How many more days until November 11? This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon graphic novel. Oni press will be releasing a hardcover edition complete with all eight chapters.
Elk’s Run is an eight chapter graphic novel that centers on a small town of Elk’s Ridge. The town was founded by Vietnam vets as a safe haven from the world of violence, chaos, corruption. But the Chapter One: A Few Pebbles showed the degradation of this utopia. A young boy is killed as a man tries to leave the town. In response the town kills him, the same way the young boy was killed. Not only for the death but because you are not supposed leave Elk Ridge.
Fialkov skillfully told this story almost entirely in narration. Done poorly, this style is lazy and boring. The artwork from Tuazon tells a story concurrent with the narration making the whole comic gel. The panels, as well as the sparse dialogue, show what’s happening real time in the town of Elk Ridge through the perspective of John while the narration gives a backhistory of the town and foreshadows what’s to come.
Elk’s Run Chapter One was eerie and a great tease to what is shaping up to be a great graphic novel. Fialkov and Tuazon created a graphic novel about a utopian society that is standing the test of time. The world now is inundated with utopias, dystopias, and apocalyptic future fictions that the genre has been reduced, reused, and recycled to the point of pure absurdity. But Elk’s Run has not diminished in the changing world of fiction. It’s enthralling and can keep readers on the edge of their seats.
Chapter One of Elk’s Run was too good. Like get out of town good. (Oh my god I didn’t even mean to create that clever of joke, but I did and I am a genius.) Since I was 9 years old when Elk’s Run originally published, I didn’t get to read it the first go around. But I am definitely reading the rest of this exciting story.
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