George Carlin once famously commented that the human life cycle is backward, and that life would make far more sense if we died first to get it out of the way, worked until we were young enough to enjoy retirement, got to party for a few years and then play for a few more, and ultimately ended life as an orgasm. The Man Who Grew Young turns this joke into a credo. In a world moving backwards, factories suck pollutants out of the air, while miners pull coal out of furnaces and bury it neatly in the ground. Cities are taken apart carefully one building at a time, while offices phase out computer technology and return to typewriters. TV viewers watch breathlessly as Neil Armstrong erases the last human footprint from the moon. Most significantly, a man named Adam Taylor waits by a graveside to meet a wife he's never known; once her casket is exhumed, she's taken to a hospital, where she comes to life and meets Adam and their son Johnny for the first time. As the years progress, Johnny gets progressively younger and finally returns to his mother's body. But Adam is haunted by the fact that he doesn't know anything about his own mother or his own origins. "No one ever left this world without a mother," his mother-in-law reassures him. And so Adam doesn't leave the world. As his family and friends go back to the womb, he continues to live on, century after century, moving back through time and looking for meaning and a purpose to his life. This 98-page graphic novel, written by award-winning Ishmael author Daniel Quinn and illustrated in a clean, detailed, vividly colored style by TV animation director Tim Eldred, is by turns a striking thought experiment, a fairy tale, a morality fable, a philosophical conundrum, and a silly piece of New Age fluff. But right up until its banal final pages, it's a mental challenge wrapped up in remarkably pretty images and deft anti-relativistic reasoning. Quinn puts a mythopoeic spin on the postmodern longing for simpler, happier times, and in the process creates a fully formed religion from scratch. The Man Who Grew Young isn't flawless: It uses the natural gaps of the comics medium to smoothly skim over the many obvious questions it raises, and its deep thoughts have the kitschy, bent-logic qualities of Saturday Night Live's "Deep Thoughts By Jack Handey." Richard Bach readers will be comfortable with its populist, philosophy-lite doctrine. But it's a startling and enjoyable read, a sort of likable, challenging picture-book primer which imposes cosmic order on a world that seems to lack it.