I'm looking for a book that I read several times in the early 80s and I'd like to try to find to give to my own children. I can't remember the title or author but I can give a description of the prologue.
The opening panels detail a spaceship traveling on a collision course with earth with and astronauts dead hand on the controls. The ship (crash?) lands on earth in the mid to late 20th century. The aliens are essentially 12 foot tall humans with much hardier bodies and long lifespans. After careful examination of the aliens and their ship a series of books is found whereupon there is a great effort to decipher the writing. A young linguist becomes fascinated with the task and becomes obsessed with cracking the code and he spends the majority of his life trying to solve the riddle. After a lifetime of work he has his eureka moment as an old man and the rest of the book is the "translation" of the chronicle that was found in the spaceship.
The book was a large-format hard cover graphic novel (comic book panels really but it was a single book) with a spaceship traveling through space.
