{"id":28368,"date":"2023-07-29T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2023-07-29T09:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=28368"},"modified":"2023-07-27T20:10:05","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T20:10:05","slug":"night-and-the-enemy-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2023\/07\/29\/night-and-the-enemy-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Night and the Enemy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\"
\nBy Harlan Ellison<\/strong> & Ken Steacy<\/strong> (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels\/Graphitti Designs)
\nISBN: 978-0-486-79961-2 (Dover TPB\/Digital edition) 978-0-936211-07-7 (Graphitti Designs Limited Editions HB)<\/p>\n

Harlan Ellison\u2019s dark and chilling space war tales are always eminently readable. This gloriously impressive re-issued volume – good luck on getting your hands on the 1987 premium hardback! – gathers five of the best and most celebrated, taken from the long-running sequence of novellas and short-stories detailing Mankind\u2019s extended intergalactic struggle against a race of star-spanning rivals. They\u2019re adapted and interpreted 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.<\/p>\n

Humanity\u2019s literary battle against the Kyben<\/em> 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<\/strong>, adapted as both an episode of The Outer Limits<\/strong> TV show in 1964 and as one of the very best of the long-gone and much-lamented DC Graphic Novel<\/strong> series, but that\u2019s a graphic extravaganza we\u2019ve already covered elsewhere\u2026<\/p>\n

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. It also piles on the treats by adding a brace of fabulously informative and keenly reminiscent Introductions: \u2018In these Pages, the War Still Wages\u2019 <\/em>from author Ellison and \u2018\u2026As We Go Forward, Into the Past!\u2019 <\/em>by astoundingly multi-talented adaptor Ken Steacy.<\/p>\n

Closing down the show are more goodies: an eye-popping glimpse at Steacy\u2019s visual virtuosity in the feature \u2018Afterwords & Pictures\u2019<\/em>,<\/em> sharing unpublished art, roughs, layouts and finished covers, as well as working models and more, and the original Afterwords \u2018War Artist\u2019 <\/em>and \u2018Whispers from the Telling Box\u2019 <\/em>by Steacy & Ellison respectively from the 1987 edition.<\/p>\n

Following a specially created \u2018Prologue\u2019 <\/em>by E & S, the pictorial panoply shifts seamlessly into the earliest tales of the epic conflict, beginning with the apocalyptic \u2018Run for the Stars\u2019<\/em>: a traditional panels and balloons strip describing life and its imminent end on Deald\u2019s World<\/em> after the hordes of Kyba drop in. It\u2019s followed by \u2018Life Hutch\u2019<\/em>, a grim survival tale combining blocks of text with big bold images in both lavish colour and stark monochrome, highlighting a soldier-survivor\u2019s battle against a malfunctioning robot\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2018The Untouchable Adolescents\u2019 <\/em>is a bright and breezy art job disguising a tragic and powerful parable of good intentions gone awry, whilst sardonic 2-pager \u2018Trojan Hearse\u2019 <\/em>rates just one powerful, lonely illustration for its cunning tale of invasion. \u2018Sleeping Dogs\u2019 <\/em>is a moody epic which fittingly concludes the short sagas with the story of a force of liberating Earthmen who trample all over a few aliens in their rush to defeat the Kyben\u2026 and realise too late they\u2019ve poked the wrong bear\u2026<\/p>\n

Fans will be delighted to find this volume also carries an original entry in the annals of the Earth-Kyba conflict with prose & picture piece \u2018<\/em>The Few\u2026 The Proud\u2019<\/em>: at the time of this collection\u2019s original release, Ellison\u2019s first new story for the sequence in 15 years.<\/p>\n

This epic tome was a groundbreaking landmark at the time of its original release and remains an innovative, compelling treat for both old and new fans of the writer, lovers of seductively unconventional graphic narrative and of course comic readers in general.<\/p>\n

Written by Harlan Ellison \u00ae. \u00a9 1987, 2015 The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All Rights Reserved. New material by Harlan Ellison\u00ae. \u00a9 2015 The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Cover and illustrations \u00a9 1987, 2015 Ken Steacy. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Harlan Ellison & Ken Steacy (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels\/Graphitti Designs) ISBN: 978-0-486-79961-2 (Dover TPB\/Digital edition) 978-0-936211-07-7 (Graphitti Designs Limited Editions HB) Harlan Ellison\u2019s dark and chilling space war tales are always eminently readable. This gloriously impressive re-issued volume – good luck on getting your hands on the 1987 premium hardback! – gathers five … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Night and the Enemy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[80,107,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adaptations","category-science-fiction","category-war-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-7ny","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28371,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28368\/revisions\/28371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}