limited edition hardcover
By Harlan Ellison & Ken Steacy (Comico)
ISBN: 0-936211-07-5
Harlan Ellison’s dark and chilling space war tales are always eminently readable. This volume sees five of the best – all taken from the long-running sequence of novellas and short-stories detailing Mankind’s last-ditch struggle against star-spanning conquerors – adapted in a variety of visual formats by air-brush wizard Ken Steacy, together with a new prose framing-sequence from the author.
The battle against the Kyben lasted ten generations and involved all manner of technologies including time travel. Probably the most famous of these is the award-winning Demon with a Glass Hand, adapted as both an episode of The Outer Limits (1964) and as a DC Graphic Novel (ISBN13: 978-0-9302-8909-6), but that’s a book for another time.
Here we have some of the earliest tales in that epic conflict, beginning with the apocalyptic ‘Run for the Stars’, a traditional panels and balloons strip, followed by ‘Life Hutch’, a grim survival tale combining blocks of text with large images in both lavish colour and stark monochrome.
‘The Untouchable Adolescents’ is a bright and breezy art job disguising a tragic and powerful parable of good intentions gone awry, whilst the sardonic two-pager ‘Trojan Hearse’ rates just one powerful, lonely illustration. ‘Sleeping Dogs’ is a moody epic that fitting concludes the adaptations but fans will be delighted to find this volume carries an original entry in the annals of the Earth-Kyba conflict with the prose and picture ‘The Few… The Proud’: Ellison’s first new story for the series in fifteen years.
This spectacular book is an innovative and compelling treat for both old-time fans of the writer and comic readers in general.
Run for the Stars, Life Hutch, The Untouchable Adolescents, Trojan Hearse, Sleeping Dogs and all additional text © 1987 The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
Art and cover © 1987 Ken Steacy. All Rights Reserved.