Night and the Enemy

I'm a huge fan of Harlan Ellison and I'm glad I was able to read this. It's interesting to see the world expanded, and I would recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Ellison.

I'm still trying to figure out if this is the part of a series or not. It's a little hard to get up to speed in some places, even with the prologue.

Here you'll few short stories taking place during a long war between earth and another planet.

Part of it is more graphic novel. Part of it is more illustrated story.

Though I love the art - it's designed well for a dark future where we've been battling aliens for years.

And Ellison always does a decent job of writing; even if in some of these stories it was hard to get my bearings at the very beginning.

And he does a decent job of communicating a truth we should all know by now: war is insanity.

And according to Ellison, no - it's not a part of a larger series.

A reissue of a graphic novel from 1987—before they were called graphic novels—this takes six Harlan Ellison stories and turns them into visual art. Other than a framing device to tie them all together, and since I haven’t seen the previous edition, I don’t know if anything has been changed in this new version.
It’s difficult to figure out how to review this: should it be just the artwork, or should I include the stories, even though they were previously published without preeeety pictures? Finally I realized most people aren’t as huge Harlan Ellison fans as me, and aren’t familiar with these stories, so I went with the latter.
Run For The Stars: Druggie gets bomb planted inside him as insurance while humans evacuate an invaded planet. Improbably he survives. For night scenes, there is an incredible amount of detail; at one point it felt like I was looking at this through thermal goggles, it was so oversaturated, yet very effective.
Life Hutch: A fighter pilot is marooned on a small planet, where he finds the refuge the military has set up for exactly these kinds of situations. Unfortunately there’s a malfunctioning robot trying to kill him, and his only hope for survival is a trick often used on cats. This started out with the same look as the previous, but turned into a very grainy black and white, with occasional forays back to the original, giving it a totally different vibe. This wasn’t so much a typical graphic novel entry as an illustrated version of the original story, if you can tell the difference as easily as I can in my head.
The Untouchable Adolescents: A young race—somehow an entire species is written as teenagers—don’t want help when their world is about to be destroyed. Not that the humans are that much smarter: “Shouldn’t have any trouble getting through to them.” Sure, tempt fate. This was easily the most visual story, with very little prose; I don’t remember reading it, so I don’t know if it was a VERY short story, but this was the best example of the pictures telling the plot.
Trojan Hearse: Short and sweet and excellent, from the title on down, with the humans stealing the plans of their enemies and finding a poetic solution to the attack. This was the opposite of the previous, with the entire story printed and some ambient paintings not showing much of anything; as great as the story was, it’s a poor selection for a graphic novel, since there’s basically no “graphic.”
Sleeping Dogs: Gung-ho human commander ignores advice and scorches an entire planet, only to be met by a power far beyond his ability to fight. This was the perfect combination of graphics and prose, though I found the story not all that great, or rather the plot typical.
The Few The Proud: The last words of a soldier at his court-martial. Once again a story that’s just words and no pictures; despite the plot, there were plenty of opportunities for visuals. . . except the one about the enemy going up in flame, which I imagine is a clear reference to Vietnam. A wasted opportunity.
There’s some behind-the-scenes illustrations at the end, plus the afterwards from the 1987 edition.
Just to make it clear, despite the unevenness of the whole, there’s a lot to enjoy here.

I gladly recommend reading Night and the Enemy by Harlan Ellison. Amazing art and a really interesting plot.

Dover Publications has done it again! They offer a reasonably priced reprint of a book, Night and the Enemy that first came out in 1987 when Ken Steacy and Harlan Ellison collaborated in bringing together Ellison's Earth-Kyba War stories in a illustrated/graphic novel format. If you like Ellison, you are likely to enjoy the book. If you have not read Ellison, this is an easy introduction to him. In any case, enjoy these snippets of a war that is long over, but the adventure still goes on.

Harlan Ellison is a modern storytelling god. this is a great title.

Dover reprints the classic Harlan Ellison/Ken Steacy collaboration NIGHT AND THE ENEMY, finally giving context to the weird story I read in EPIC ILLUSTRATED when I was a kid.....

NIGHT AND THE ENEMY is actually a collection of loosely-related stories by Harlan Ellison that depict scenes from the Earth/Kyben War that raged across the galaxy for centuries. The stories range from traditional comic to prose with spot illustrations, and they're all wonderfully rendered by Ken Steacy. I encountered the first story in this collection, RUN FOR THE STARS, in the pages of EPIC ILLUSTRATED, and I was thrilled to find it here, but disappointed to discover that there was no resolution to the (seeming) cliffhanger that the story ends on. From there, Ellison and Steacy present small scenes from various points in the war, all telling compelling stories that offer a tantalizing glimpse at the conflict as a whole. The entire affair is wrapped up in an interesting, if slightly unnecessary, framing device.

I'm not much of a fan of Ellison....His hijinks as a person have colored my ability to enjoy his work as a writer, and this is really the first work of his that I've ever made it all of the way through. It's not a perfect book, at least not in my opinion....I'm generally not a fan of prose in the middle of my comic-books, and the long text sections were kind of a chore to get through, but they were all rewarding in the end. It's great to see Dover reprinting lost or forgotten comics and graphic novels from decades ago, and this will make a welcome addition the the bookshelves of Science Fiction, Ellison, and Steacy fans alike. Good stuff.

A collection of stories connected by the central theme of a war between humans and an alien race.

Some good sketches. Bright colours, that jump at you. Psychodelic. Vivid, with strong contrasts. I like the page layouts of the pages with less text. The font used was boring.

Good stories. And humans are not necessarily the good guys. Or the smart ones. There is a lot of crazy. More elaboration would have been nice, the stories felt unfinished. In total pretty depressing.

Quite a lot of text for a comic. Some stories are balanced evenly between sketches and text, others look more like classic comics. One story is text only with an illustrated banner at the top. Not necessarily what I would understand as a graphic novel.

I received this free copy from the publisher/author via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

Amazon reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1YL0GBWAX10B6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0486799611

http://www.amazon.de/review/R24OJK0VXXJCPT/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0486799611

Even decades after it's original publication and moving into graphic form Ellison's brilliant prose continues to shine

This is a graphic collection of five short stories about the Earth-Kyba war. It is science fiction. It is well written as I expected from the author Harlan Ellison. The illustrations done by Ken Steacy are perfect for each story. At times, I was a little confused where one story ended and another started. However this did not keep me from enjoying this graphic novel. It is a book for every Harlan Ellison collectors! Do read it or you will miss some excellent writing.

If you LOVE brightly colored art, this book is for you. If you love collections of stories, this is also a fit for you (double win for me). Night and the Enemy is a great fit for people looking for high drama stories within the sci-fi genre. Overall it could be viewed as something for a niche market, which is why it received 4/5 stars from me - I'm definitely in the niche!

*Thank you to Dover and Netgalley for providing me this book in exchange for my honest review.

Fantastic classic sci-fi short story fiction by one of my favourite author's of the pre-80s. These five stories don't really have anything to do with each other except that they take place during a two-hundred-year war between Earth and a humanoid race, the Kyben. Most of the stories are personal encounters with characters and a couple deal with the follies of war. I love Ellison's characterization and dialogue and his science isn't overly techie so it doesn't sound outdated or campy. I really enjoyed these stories, which I don't remember having read at all before. However, the art didn't appeal to me at all. The colours are muddy and the people are stiff with unnatural faces. I kind of got a "Thunderbirds" vibe from it for some reason, like they were puppets. A couple of the stories have been adapted into graphic "comic" style while the others are simply the full text of the short stories illustrated in full colour.

Harlan Ellison is one of those writers that people tend to either really like or really hate. I fall in to the former category. I'll buy anything with Harlan's name on it, and have since 1975 when I first discovered him for myself. And one of the things that I have liked about Harlan's career is that he works in a variety of mediums - from fiction to essays to television to graphic novels. And I will admit that I haven't kept up with his graphic novel work as much as I have his other writings. And maybe, now that I've read this, I now know why.

When Harlan Ellison writes fiction, his imagination is his canvas and he uses words to paint incredible pictures. When he writes specifically for the graphic novel, he understands that the artist does some of the work and he backs off, ever so slightly, from painting the full picture. And if you have one of the more brilliant graphic novel artists who can keep up with the quality of an Ellison story, the output could be stupendous. But on the other end ... if the artist can't do Ellison justice, the output could be a disaster. In this case, it is the latter.

Ellison's five stories here are decent, though not necessarily his top works, but still ... it's Harlan Ellison and worth reading.

Ken Steacy's art is tremendously lacking. Don't be fooled by the cover as seen above. If you haven't already learned this, the cover art on graphic novels is rarely as eye-catching or as strong as the work inside. Steacy's art is full of vibrant colors. At times, it reminded me of the coloring in Richard Corben's artwork (as I remember it from the early days of Heavy Metal magazine), but there (colors) the similarity ends. Despite shadings and fore-shortening, Steacy's artwork is terribly flat and uninteresting. This work was much more the work of an amateur than a seasoned professional. Which is not to say that all amateurs aren't capable of producing strong works, it just happens that in this case, the artist isn't ready for this level of exposure.

It's hard to overlook the art to review the story when discussing a graphic novel. The stories have a common theme - they each relate to Earth-Kyba (an alien race) relations and war. The first story, "Run For the Stars" was my favorite and was very Ellison-esque. Humans are about to evacuate a planet but they don't trust the Kyba so (giving the Kyba a reason not to trust humans) the humans plant a bomb inside one man and leave him alone on the planet to fend off the aliens. I also enjoyed "The Untouchable Adolescents" in which a race of very young aliens have learned not to trust outsiders, so when the earth men say they are there to help because the planet core is not stable, the aliens (or locals) don't want their help. But of course learn too late that they do need help.

I liked the premise of "Sleeping Dogs" but the story lacked some substance (this felt like it was written specifically to tie in to the collection, and rather hastily). "The Few The Proud" felt like a Vietnam commentary.

This is perhaps one of my least favorite Harlan Ellison collections, but I'd still read some weaker Ellison over many other writers.

Looking for a good book? The reissue of Night and the Enemy, by Harlan Ellison and Ken Steacy features some typically Ellison fiction with some not quite great artwork.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.