Feature: Lucky Penny Reviews 

“Lucky Penny”

By | July 11th, 2017
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

This evergreen review, we cast our eyes back—but not that far back—to March 2016, the print release of “Lucky Penny.”

Written by Ananth Hirsh
Illustrated by Yuko Ota

If Penny Brighton didn’t have bad luck, she’d have no luck at all. She lost her job. And her apartment. In the same day. But it’s okay, her friend has a cozy storage unit she can crash in. And there’s bound to be career opportunities at the neighborhood laundromat—just look how fast that 12-year-old who runs the place made it to management! Plus, there’s this sweet guy at the community center, and maybe Penny can even have a conversation with him without being a total dork. Surely Penny is a capable of becoming an actual responsible adult, and if she can do that her luck’s bound to change! Right?

The premise of “Lucky Penny” is one that invites the reader to speculate at the outset. Penny has bad luck, so every scene has a silent question hanging over it: What misfortune will befall Penny this time? We know something’s going to go wrong, it’s just a matter of what, and the book toys with the reader’s expectations. However, it’s not the disasters I enjoyed while reading this book, but rather the way Penny weathers them. She’s a human disaster, but an endearing one.

As much as Penny would have us believe she’s just unlucky, the truth is she unwittingly manufactures most of her bad luck, and all things considered, she’s probably lucky things aren’t worse. She has no filters whatsoever when she gets an idea, no critical evaluation at all, and once she’s has an idea she’s fully committed.

I mean, at one point she’s at a laundromat and she sticks her mail into a washing machine for safe keeping and sticks an ‘out of order’ sign on the door. No disaster ensues, but Penny’s complete lack of awareness that she’s manufacturing a potential disaster is bafflingly fascinating. I mean, she does this and her attitude is is like, ’Yup, totally nailed it. My mail is safe.’ It’s this, her over-commitment to bad ideas, that I find most amusing. Well, that and the tiny self-inflicted problems she creates in her life.

“Lucky Penny” is my first introduction to the work of Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota, and it’s convinced me I need to read more from them (“Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us” is already on my wishlist). A big part of the reason this story works is the in the confidence of their partnership. Simple scenes like Penny curling up in her bed in her storage-unit home, reading “Her Longing His Longship” work because Hirsh trusts Ota to silently fill the scene with everything it needs. For a little while, Penny can be somewhere else, living another life and she lights up more than ever. But, as she puts down her book, and settles in for the night, there’s a little bit of sad annoyance that slips through, shown by a glance at her tattoo on her neck.

Moments like these ended up being my favorite stuff in the book. Ota brings the characters to life so vividly on the page that sharing in their interior life is effortless. They interact in a kind of heightened honesty—all the characters bear their heart on their sleeve in some form or another.

That said, there’s a rough patch. For me, the book works best when it’s restrained and at its most mundane—somehow the characters shine that much brighter when eating noodles over a shared cooking pot, their chopsticks bumping each other’s awkwardly—but when the book veers into action heavy moments or cartoon villainy, the humor becomes a bit strained and the character work less engaging. The book gives Penny a bunch of problems, and I was looking forward to seeing how she dealt with them… but then all that is pushed aside for a battle sequence.

In a story that spends so much of its time developing very honest moments between its characters, the action sequence has the characters at their least honest, like they’re play acting, and so instead of heightening the stakes, it actually does the opposite. The sequence is still fun and engaging, but less so than the rest of the book. It’s at its best when it is simply honest.

Continued below

Fortunately, “Lucky Penny” is a story that’s more about the journey than the destination, and this was a journey brought to life with such sincerity and affection. Penny loves her saucy romance novels, and while this is played for humor, it’s never the butt of the joke either. They’re fun and they’re celebrated in all their trashiness (and one of them is titled “The Sexening,” which is so fantastically blunt and tactless, I can’t help but snicker every time I read it).

And this goes for the characters too. Penny, Walter, Helen, Boyfriend… each is celebrated on the page without hiding behind a veneer of irony. Hirsh and Ota have the confidence to be sentimental. The greatest joys of “Lucky Penny” are when we experience joy alongside its characters.

This article was updated from its original version with art from the published book of “Lucky Penny” and not the serialized online version. Thank you, Oni Press, for supplying these.


//TAGS | evergreen

Mark Tweedale

Mark writes Haunted Trails, The Harrow County Observer, The Damned Speakeasy, and a bunch of stuff for Mignolaversity. An animator and an eternal Tintin fan, he spends his free time reading comics, listening to film scores, watching far too many video essays, and consuming the finest dark chocolates. You can find him on BlueSky.

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