Earlier this month, Faith Erin Hicks’s new book “One Year at Ellsmere” came out from First Second. But was it new? Back in 2008, SLG Publishing released “The War at Ellsmere,” also by Faith Erin Hicks. Isn’t this just the same book with a new title? In a broad sense, yes—“War” readers will find “One Year” very familiar—and yet this new book is also very different, rescripted and redrawn, and now with the addition of color. So for this review, we’re going to do something a little different. This isn’t so much a review of “One Year at Ellsmere,” but rather a review of the revisions between “The War at Ellsmere” and “One Year at Ellsmere.” I want to go in depth with this, so if you haven’t read the book yet, I should warn you this review is going to be packed with spoilers.
“The War at Ellsmere”
Written and illustrated by Faith Erin Hicks
Juniper is the newest scholarship student at the prestigious Ellsmere Academy. She soon finds herself labeled a “special project,” harried by stringent standards, and in the novel position of being someone’s nemesis.
Luckily for Jun, she has an ally in the quirky Cassie, who tells her the story of Ellsmere’s eccentric founders and the legend of the creature that roams the woods on the school’s grounds. But can Cassie help Jun survive Ellsmere? Between queen bees and mythical beasts, Jun has quite the year ahead of her.
“One Year at Ellsmere”
Written and illustrated by Faith Erin Hicks
Colored by Shelli ParolineWas boarding school supposed to be this hard?
When studious thirteen-year-old Juniper wins a scholarship to the prestigious Ellsmere Academy, she expects to find a scholastic utopia. But living at Ellsmere is far from ideal: She is labeled a “special project,” Ellsmere’s queen bee is out to destroy her, and it’s rumored that a mythical beast roams the forest next to the school.
Ever since the revised edition of “Ellsmere” was announced back in January 2019, I’ve been fascinated. Not just because Faith Erin Hicks is one of my favorite cartoonists, but because I can’t help seeing what a creator chooses to keep, what to augment, and what to outright change. It was a fascination I developed at a young age from reading Hergé’s “The Adventures of Tintin” when I realised that some of the older books looked more modern than younger books—a fascination that remains to this day.
“The War at Ellsmere” was Hicks’s second book, and sold roughly 2000 copies. Since then, Hicks has made quite her name for herself, even going so far as to win two Eisner awards (Best Publication for Kids for “The Adventures of Superhero Girl” in 2014 and “The Divided Earth” in 2019). It’s fair to say her audience has grown considerably since 2008, and that “The War at Ellsmere” could find new life with these readers. In some ways, “The War at Ellsmere” was ahead of the curve, a comic book about girls for girls at a time when that audience was woefully underserved. Now that same market is booming.
The most obvious change from “War” to “One Year” is the art. Hicks completely re-inked the book. The backgrounds remain largely consistent with their “War” counterparts, aside from subtracting or adding a few details to better guide the eye to the right place in the panel. (This is especially noticeable in Jun and Cassie’s room.) However, the characters are completely redrawn.
Right: 2020's “One Year at Ellsmere”
Hicks’s style has evolved a lot in twelve years, and her performance through her art has improved so much. (That said, she was always good right from the beginning.) Hicks lets characters’ expressions and eyelines and body language carry the story more, which allows her to trim down the dialogue a bit, making for a smoother, more succinct read.
In terms of layouts, the really obvious changes come in the form of horizontally flipped panels, especially in action sequences. I made a point of mentioning how beautifully Hicks’s action flows in my review for “The Divided Earth”, a 200+ page book, the bulk of which is action. I think it’s fair to say that Hicks learned a lot while making “The Nameless City” trilogy, and a big part of that was managing scene direction. When a character is moving forward unimpeded, they’re moving left to right, and when there are obstacles or dead ends, they’re moving right to left against the reading direction. By flipping panels in “Ellsmere” to adhere to these rules, the tension of the action reads on a subconscious level. It’s simply better visual storytelling.
Continued belowFor me, the biggest change in the story is in the portrayal of Emily, the rich girl that makes Jun and Cassie’s lives at Ellsmere hell. In “The War at Ellsmere,” Emily is a largely unsympathetic character that brings out a harsher side of Jun. In “One Year at Ellsmere,” almost every scene involving Emily has had dialogue revisions, softening moments where Jun is brought down to Emily’s level, saying things that are downright cruel. Emily is given more nuance; she’s a much more carefully defined character in “One Year” with lines augmented to reveal more of what motivates her. In one sequence, Hicks has gone so far to completely exorcize an “evil villain” speech and write an entirely new exchange hitting the same beats, but now revealing a vulnerability in Emily that she tries to hide.
Hicks takes an idea from “War” and turns it into a motif in “One Year,” which is that there’s something in Emily that is broken and she knows it, even if she won’t admit it. And this is important because it reflects an aspect of Jun, a fear that she has about herself. It’s not that this aspect wasn’t present in the original, it was just that by making Emily an outright villain, it didn’t have near the same resonance that it has in the revised version.
Of course, there’s a major addition to “One Year” that was utterly absent in “War”—Shelli Paroline’s colors. The colors fundamentally changed the way I read the story. There’s a plot thread that runs through “Ellsmere” about the creature that lives in the forest around Ellsmere Academy and the rumors of what happened to Lord Ellsmere’s sons. In it, the younger son becomes obsessed with killing a white deer he sees in the forest despite warning from the elder brother to leave it alone. The younger son has something to prove, whereas the elder son is kind and seeks harmony. What happened to the sons is unknown, only that they disappeared in the forest and that a scream of anger was heard.
In “The War at Ellsmere,” I simply read this story as something to explain the angry spirit that manifested as an angry white unicorn in the forest. I didn’t connect it to the larger story of Jun, Emily, and Cassie. I mean, Cassie had a fascination with this story, but I never read it as more than that.
With the addition of color, I sudden saw the white more. There isn’t just a white deer and a white unicorn in “One Year at Ellsmere,” now the elder brother rides a white horse, now Cassie’s painting of a horse in art class is also white. Suddenly Cassie’s anger comes through in the story more and connects to the anger of the unicorn and the elder Ellsmere brother. She’s such a good-hearted and gentle character, but she’s bullied mercilessly by Emily and her entourage, and there’s resentment in her for how she’s functionally an orphan since her parents are so disengaged with her life.
Suddenly, the unicorn in “Ellsmere” isn’t literally a unicorn anymore. As Cassie says, “. . . it’s something that hates cruelty, but sometimes it’s cruel as well.”
As much as I like Hicks’s work, when I originally read “The War at Ellsmere,” I was frustrated with how little agency Jun had near the end of the book. Cassie is the one with all the agency, and in the end the pair of them are saved by the convenient arrival of the unicorn. But that was not at all my experience reading “One Year at Ellsmere.”
Yes, Jun still doesn’t have much agency, but that’s because Cassie is the transformative character in this story. The unicorn at the end of the story isn’t the arrival of some mythic creature, it’s the dam breaking. It’s Cassie. Emily’s actions have pushed Cassie to the point that she may lose the one friend she has at Ellsmere, and all that rage comes out. But, Cassie stops herself before going too far and calms herself. Still, it was enough for Emily to see a unicorn—a kind and calm person’s rage—and it terrified her.
Cassie is a kindhearted character and I don’t really want to see a story where her rage comes out. By wrapping this aspect of the story in a metaphor, it made it much more powerful to me. . . It’s just that in the black and white version, the metaphor went over my head. A white horse in black and white is just a horse, so even though there is still repeated imagery to connect the dots, the addition of color makes the white in this story not simply much more apparent, but immediate and obvious.
“One Year at Ellsmere” is still the same story as “The War at Ellsmere,” but one that employs more focused storytelling. Hicks and Paroline took a story I already enjoyed and elevated it. This isn’t a “director’s cut” that adds new scenes, making for a “bigger and better” version of the same story. Hicks cuts lines of dialogue, and cuts panels and even pages at times, and anything she adds accentuates what’s already there—they are additions for the sake of clarity, respecting the spirit of the original story.
“One Year at Ellsmere” breathes new life into “The War at Ellsmere” in the best possible way.
