Pawn Shop by Joey Esposito

Published by Z2 Comics on November 26, 2015

A lot of books have been written about New York City and what it means to the people who reside there. Pawn Shop touches on a handful of lives, isolated people surrounded by other isolated people, who manage in ways that are large and small to make connections with other New Yorkers.

Pawn Shop is a graphic novel told in four chapters that read like linked stories. To a greater or lesser extent, each chapter revolves around a pawn shop. The first is narrated by an elderly man who can’t leave the city behind. He moved to Long Island after his wife died but he keeps coming back, despite his feeling that the city has moved on without him. Moving on is something he can’t do, as evidenced by his daily excursions to the city where his memories linger. One of his memories is symbolized by an object that represents more than the object itself. The story is a touching examination of loss and of moving on.

The second chapter is told from the point of view of a regular visitor at the pawn shop who is comforted by the safety of his daily routine. Part of that routine involves a minor character in the first story. But routines are limiting. The young man wonders whether he will find the courage to put his life on a different path.

Near the end of the second chapter, the young man encounters a young woman on a train who is the focus of the third chapter, which circles back to the old man in the first chapter and to the events that bring him to the pawn shop. A woman who appears tangentially in the first two chapters narrates the last one. Along with the old man in the first chapter, she has the kind of karmic experience that turns a big city into a small place.

Each of the four central characters is undergoing (or deciding whether to undergo) a life-changing transition. Each closes a door, but that creates the possibility of another door opening, a door to a less suffocating life. Each character benefits from connections to the other characters, often in ways that they will never understand. New Yorkers might feel isolated, but Pawn Shop tells us that they are never alone. Maybe the novel’s two karmic moments are hokey, maybe the message is a little obvious, but in the end, I didn’t care. This short graphic novel is emotionally honest and more moving than most of the 400 page novels I’ve read.

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Night and the Enemy by Harlan Ellison

First published in 1987; revised edition published by Dover on November 18, 2015

Over the years, Harlan Ellison wrote several stories about the Earth-Kyba War. Five of those were eventually adapted to graphic format with artist Ken Steacey. A couple appeared, or were slated to appear, in magazines. All five were published as Night and the Enemy in 1987. The Dover edition (2015) adds new introductions by Ellison and Steacey and includes the story “The Few, the Proud” which was not in the original edition.

“Run for the Stars” first appeared in 1957. A drug addict who is forced to run or die at the hands of the Kyben might be Earth’s last best hope of preparing for a Kyben attack. The addict discovers himself as he runs, finds courage he did not know he possessed. As he explains in the introduction, Ellison wrote the original version of this story in his early days, when he was banging out stories as quickly as he could to keep food on the table. That explains why the prose has a first draft quality, but with Ellison it is the gut-punch power of the story that matters.

“Life Hutch” is a vivid account of a man who steers his disabled ship to a planet with a life hutch, only to be attacked and nearly killed by a dysfunctional robot. The story first appeared in 1956. Again, the prose is a little rough but the intensity is pure Ellison. There is almost no dialog in “Life Hutch” so this is more an illustrated story than a graphic adaptation.

“Untouchable Adolescents” (1957) is a “first contact” story with a planet whose inhabitants have already had an unfortunate contact with the Kyben. The kindly humans want to save the alien planet, which is about to crumble apart, but the aliens, having experienced “help” from the Kyben, aren’t interested. “Trojan Hearse” (1956) is a very short story about a Kyben attempt to invade Earth. These are both mildly interesting stories, but weaker than the others in the collection.

“Sleeping Dogs” (1964) is one of the volume’s highlights. Probably influenced by Vietnam, the story concerns the destruction of innocents in blind devotion to a cause. This is a subtler, more nuanced view of the Earth-Kyber war than the earlier stories portray. Not only is it one of the volume’s best stories, it is one of the most successful graphic adaptations of Ellison’s original text.

Another highlight, “The Few, the Proud” (1989), did not appear in the original edition of Night and the Enemy. It is an unillustrated addition to the 2015 edition. The story is basically a monologue, the statement of a man who is about to be sentenced for desertion, after being sold on the glory of military service, only to realize that killers aren’t heroes. No matter the cause for which they kill, no matter how hatefully the enemy is portrayed, they are still nothing more than killers.

This is a volume that Ellison fans will want to acquire, but any fan of graphic storytelling should also enjoy it.

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Four Eyes vol. 1 by Joe Kelly

Published as a trade paperback by Image Comics on July 23, 2015

This volume collects the first four issues of a comic book series that began publication in 2008. It tells a depression-era story dominated by Italian-American characters. It is set in an alternate history that is much like our own except for the dragons. I'm not typically a fan of dragon stories, but Four Eyes is not a typical dragon tale. You could almost view the dragons as a metaphor but for the fact that they're actually flying around and eating people. At other times they're fighting each other like pit bulls in warehouses as people place bets on the outcome, much to the consternation of animal rights activists. Now that's an original twist on dragon stories.

Anyway, the story isn't so much about dragons as it is about an impoverished young boy named Enrico who sets aside the prospect of an education to help support his mother by working for meager wages after his father is killed while trying to steal a baby dragon. It's the story of a kid who wants to avenge his father's death, to hold accountable the gangsters who organize the dragon fights. It's also the story of a child who wants to please his father even after his father is dead, a child who needs to overcome fears and come of age a bit early.

Joe Kelly's prose is a level or two above the writing typically found in graphic novels. The art is strange and creepy. In other words, the art is really good. So is the story.

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (graphic adaptation) by Denise Mina

Published by Vertigo on July 28, 2015

This is a faithful adaptation of a compelling story -- the story of Lizbeth Salander's conflicts with her father, with the government, and with her past. The graphic novel retains the flavor as well as the plot of Stieg Larsson's novel. A graphic adaptation is necessarily condensed, but the best ones use images to convey much of the story contained in the original narrative (a picture replaces a thousand words). The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest does that intelligently, striking a sensible balance between words and graphics. Traditional dialog balloons tell us what characters are saying but Denise Mina avoids the expository blocks of text that crowd out the art in so many graphic novels.

In fact, the absence of text boxes and the inclusion of panels that have no words at all give the story a cinematic feel. A page might introduce a new scene in a close-up panel, following it with a wide angle panel, giving the impression of having panned back. There's a real sense of flow and movement that contributes to the sense of watching a movie.

This might be a good alternative for readers who want to know why the world went so crazy for the Millennium novels but don't want to take the time to read one. Of course, a graphic adaptation never has all the subtlety or nuance of a full novel, but Stieg Larsson was not big on subtlety, so readers won't necessarily miss much by reading the graphic version. All the essentials are preserved here, including dramatic tension and character development. While Denise Mina's adaptation isn't meant as a Cliff's Notes version of the original, the graphic form might help even help readers who decide to read Larsson's novel by adding clarity to a complex plot.

The art is shadowy and moody. It is a bit inconsistent -- two artists worked on this, which might account for the different renderings of faces in different parts of the book -- but on the whole the art suits the story.

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How the World Was: A California Childhood by Emmanuel Guibert

Published by First Second on July 15, 2014

This is an English translation of a work first published in French. Unlike a typical graphic novel that uses dialog balloons, How the World Was is more of an illustrated short story. Sometimes text appears in the same panel as an image; sometimes blocks of text take up panels or pages that alternate with panels or pages consisting only of images. Some of the images depict the scene described in the text while others add background. They tend to be studies in contrasts: quiet streets of the 1930s versus modern freeways, unspoiled nature versus the urbanization that replaced it. The pictures serve as pauses between the short blocks of text, creating the feel of a documentary.

The first person narration tells the childhood tale of a boy born in 1925 as he grew up in Southern California -- a simpler California than the one that exists today. His quiet memories are occasionally updated to let the reader know what happened to friends and relatives (mostly, they died "in poverty and in sorrow"). Some of the images are drawings of family photographs and in many ways, the story is the narration of a family album.

The story is told in a gentle, honest voice that accentuates its depth of feeling. Reading How the World Was is like listening to a beloved grandfather explain the joys and hardships of his family's life and his own awe of the ever-changing world. The narrator has learned to live with grief but the grief lives on in his memory. He cannot change the hard times -- that's how the world was -- but they have taught him to appreciate life. When he quotes Rodin's belief that artists experience pain as well as "the bitter joy of being able to comprehend and express it," Emmanuel Guibert is clearly talking about the effort he devoted to this volume. How the World Was is a surprisingly moving story and a remarkably effective feat of graphic storytelling.

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