The one thing that links all the Republican presidential hopefuls, except for a lust to inhabit the White House, is the invocation of the spirit of Ronald Reagan.

No candidates’ debate goes by without each in turn mentioning with appropriate reverence the name of the Great Communicator in order to suggest that they are Reagan’s true heir and that the golden age of conservatism, when Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ruled the roost, can be restored.

Yet the world has moved on since Reagan tackled head on the evils of the Soviet Union and restored American confidence abroad. Reagan left the White House for the last time nearly 20 years ago, when the Soviet Union was still in its death throes.

To have voted for Reagan’s reelection in 1984, an American would have had to be in his mid forties. To the generation and a half which has grown up since, the name Ronald Reagan is little more than a totem of a time when American conservatism was in the ascendant.

After nearly eight years of neo-conservatism, the Reagan years seem a distant age of clarity, confidence, and certainty.

The contenders are right to hanker after a little of Reagan’s magic dust. There is genuine and continuing demand for information about how the Gipper changed the political landscape at home and began to redraw the maps laid down by the victors at the end of World War II.

That desire is behind an unlikely and novel means of discovering the facts of Reagan’s life: Ronald Reagan, a Graphic Biography, published next week by Hill and Wang.

To portray the story of Reagan’s road to and life in the White House as a comic strip may seem a trivial means of imparting a grand political message, but the effort turns out to be both ingenious and fair minded, showing with admirable impartiality how a poor boy from Tampico, Ill., became president via commentating on football matches, acting in Hollywood pictures, as a celebrity spokesman for General Electric, and becoming governor of California.

Comic strips have come a long way since DC Comics gave birth to Superman and the other pulp fiction superheroes. From the moment Roy Lichtenstein elevated the form to the highest art, comic books in the guise of “graphic novels” have attempted to be taken seriously both as art and as literature, with mixed results.

The Reagan graphic biography lifts the ambition of the form to a new plane, and if the likeness of Reagan is sometimes woefully approximate and the drawing of other familiar characters, such as John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Mikhail Gorbachev, suggest only a vague acquaintance with reality, it is hard to fault the seriousness of the enterprise.

To ensure accuracy, the book is at times too wordy and strains to encapsulate the long career of the oldest politician ever to enter the White House in a limited number of frames, but never mind.

At best, the book is eloquent. To illustrate Reagan’s reach to a wide variety of differing audiences, three similar frames are run one on top of the other, with Reagan making identical points to a group of blue collar urban workers, to a party of black-tied rich Americans, and to a gathering of mid-Western cowpokes.

Reagan’s endless string of homilies and jokes helps keep up the pace of the narrative, and his simple one liners, such as his appeal at the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” are used, as in life, to enormous effect.

What the book achieves above all, however, is to clearly demonstrate that, whatever they may hope for, no single Republican candidate comes anywhere near aping Reagan’s natural political genius.

Tomorrow, the actor Fred Thompson will throw his hat in the ring. His supporters would like us to believe that he, more than any others in the field, has the right stuff to inherit the Reagan mantle. Like Reagan, he is a remarried divorcee who sticks to the big picture rather than get bogged down in policy detail. Like Reagan, he has enjoyed a successful career in Hollywood. Like Reagan, too, he is very old.

But for all Mr. Thompson’s phantom campaigning so far, there is little sign that he has what it takes to be a second Reagan.

The rest of the field is, if anything, even less able to claim a Reagan dimension. Their messages are not straightforward enough. They fail to invoke the optimism for America’s future that Reagan found deep in his own sunny character.

What is missing above all is an ability to appear relaxed and likeable when under pressure. Which Republican contender could stop their opponents dead in their tracks with the line “There you go again,” as a smiling Reagan did to President Carter? Not a one.

It may be, as the conservative commentator George Will has written, that the Republicans, both those who are offering themselves for election and those who long for a candidate for whom they can be enthusiastic, are hankering after the impossible.

The simple fact is that there is no successor to Reagan. He, like Lady Thatcher, was sui generis, and it is unreasonable to measure others against him.

The unelectable are left in pursuit of the unattainable. That being so, it might be to their advantage if the GOP candidates were to stop inviting such an inappropriate comparison.