By Harlan Ellison & Ken Steacy (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels)
ISBN: 978-0-486-79961-2
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Stunning Sci Fi Blockbuster Brilliance… 9/10
Harlan Ellison’s dark and chilling space war tales are always eminently readable.
This gloriously impressive re-issued volume gathers five of the best and most celebrated – all taken from the long-running but intermittent sequence of novellas and short-stories detailing Mankind’s extended intergalactic struggle against a race of star-spanning rivals – adapted in a variety of visual formats by air-brush wizard and aviation-addict Ken Steacy, together with a new prose framing-sequence from the author.
Humanity’s literary battle against the Kyben spanned ten generations and involved all manner of technologies up to and including time-travel. Probably the most famous of them is the award-winning Demon with a Glass Hand, adapted as both an episode of The Outer Limits TV show in 1964 and as one of the very best of the long-gone and much-lamented DC Graphic Novel series, but that’s a graphic extravaganza we’ve already covered elsewhere…
Right here, right now, this classy full-colour album-sized paperback resurrects a glorious artefact first released by Comico and Graphitti Designs in 1987, just as the market for English-language graphic novels was taking off, and piles on the goodies by adding a brace of fabulously informative and keenly reminiscent Introductions: ‘In these Pages, the War Still Wages’ from author Ellison and ‘…As We Go Forward, Into the Past!’ by astoundingly multi-talented adaptor Ken Steacy.
Closing down the show there’s more goodies: an eye-popping glimpse at Steacy’s visual virtuosity in the feature ‘Afterwords & Pictures’ revealing unpublished art, roughs, layouts and finished covers as well as working models and more, plus the original Afterwords ‘War Artist’ and ‘Whispers from the Telling Box’ by Steacy and Ellison respectively from the 1987 edition.
Following a specially created ‘Prologue’ by E & S, the pictorial panoply shifts seamlessly into the earliest tales in the epic conflict, beginning with the apocalyptic ‘Run for the Stars’, a traditional panels and balloons strip describing life and its imminent end on Deald’s World after the hordes of Kyba drop in, followed by ‘Life Hutch’, a grim survival tale combining blocks of text with large images in both lavish colour and stark monochrome highlighting a soldier-survivor’s battle against a malfunctioning robot…
‘The Untouchable Adolescents’ is a bright and breezy art job disguising a tragic and powerful parable of good intentions gone awry, whilst sardonic two-pager ‘Trojan Hearse’ rates just one powerful, lonely illustration for its cunning tale of invasion. ‘Sleeping Dogs’ is a moody epic which fittingly concludes the adaptations with the story of a force of liberating Earth men who trample all over a few aliens in their rush to defeat the Kyben and realise too late they’ve poked the wrong bear…
However fans will be delighted to find this volume also carries an original entry in the annals of the Earth-Kyba conflict with the prose and picture ‘The Few… The Proud’: at the time of this collection’s original release, Ellison’s first new story for the series in fifteen years…
This epic tome was a groundbreaking landmark and the time of its original release and remains an innovative and compelling treat for both old and new fans of the writer, lovers of seductively unconventional graphic narrative and of course comic readers in general.
Written by Harlan Ellison®. © 1987, 2015 The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All Rights Reserved. New material by Harlan Ellison®. © 2015 The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Cover and illustrations © 1987, 2015 Ken Steacy. All Rights Reserved.
Night and the Enemy is available in comic shops and online around the world right now and can be pre-ordered online for a December 25th release in the UK.