“Pumpkinheads”

First Second has had a superb run of books lately. “Stargazing,” “Are You Listening?,” “Castle in the Stars: The Knights of Mars,” and “The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited!”—all not just good books, but excellent books, and you can certainly count Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks’s “Pumpkinheads” among them.

Written by Rainbow Rowell
Illustrated by Faith Erin Hicks
Colored by Sarah Stern

Deja and Josiah are seasonal best friends.

Every autumn, all through high school, they’ve worked together at the best pumpkin patch in the whole wide world. (Not many people know that the best pumpkin patch in the whole wide world is in Omaha, Nebraska, but it definitely is.) They say good-bye every Halloween, and they’re reunited every September 1.

But this Halloween is different—Josiah and Deja are finally seniors, and this is their last season at the pumpkin patch. Their last shift together. Their last good-bye.

Josiah’s ready to spend the whole night feeling melancholy about it. Deja isn’t ready to let him. She’s got a plan: What if—instead of moping and the usual slinging lima beans down at the Succotash Hut—they went out with a bang? They could see all the sights! Taste all the snacks! And Josiah could finally talk to that cute girl he’s been mooning over for three years. . .

What if their last shift was an adventure?

I don’t recall having ever read a comic like “Pumpkinheads” before—a two-hundred-page graphic novel that unfolds over a period of about six hours, the course of a single evening. Every comic I’ve ever read that’s set over a short period of time is likewise rather short, but “Pumpkinheads” takes its time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s brisk when it needs to be, but overall it’s not afraid to be slow, and I’m so grateful for that. “Pumpkinheads” is a story about two friends spending their last evening together before the next stage of their lives. You could tell the story over far fewer pages, but you’d lose the spark that makes it special. It’s not a story driven by plot, but by emotions, and you do the story a disservice if you don’t give the emotional moments room to breathe.

And not just the big emotions; all of the emotions. You know that feeling when you eat a favourite seasonal food, but the way the future’s taking shape, you’re not even sure if next year you’ll be around to eat that food again? It’s this weird mix of joy and sadness and nostalgia and uncertainty. And, no, in the grand scheme of things it’s not that important, but it’s another pebble in an avalanche of change. “Pumpkinheads” works because it invests in emotions like these and gives them space to settle in and make an impact.

The slower pace, the investment in small moments, and the narrow timeframe of the story all work together to make “Pumkinheads” feel like a book you’re inside, not a book you’re simply reading. This may be Josiah (Josie) and Deja’s adventure, but we’re along for the ride as an invisible third member of this duo.

This is my first exposure to Rainbow Rowell’s work, and boy has she ever go my attention now. I can’t help but be a little cautious about a novelist doing a comic—comics are a very different discipline—but Rowell takes to comics like a seasoned pro. She makes strong choices that resonate.

For example, “Pumpkinheads” is a book you’ll pick up and read in one go, and yet Rowell wrote in chapter breaks. Some of these chapters are a mere four pages, so I can’t imagine there are many people that’d reach the end of a chapter, slip in a bookmark, and come back to the book tomorrow. So if the chapters aren’t built-in breaks for the reader, why do they even exist? They become punctuation. It lets the last words of a chapter hang for a bit before we delve into the next (often paired with a punny title). Most importantly though, they’re a contrast to the rest of the story. This is a story about Josie and Deja, but the Pumpkin Patch & Autumn Jamboree is busy with crowds. The chapter breaks isolate Josie and Deja against white. In these moments it’s just them. The chapter breaks are little islands in the sea of the festival; fragments of the evening that the two will remember years later.

For me, these chapter breaks became one of the defining characteristics of the book. For something so simple, I dwell on them on a reread.

Speaking of rereading, as much as I enjoyed “Pumpkinheads” the first time through, I enjoyed it much more as a reread. In the first read through I was getting to know Josie and Deja, but since this is a story about familiarity in a lot of ways, going into the story already knowing the characters made me appreciate the book on a whole other level. I simply read the characters better, and as a result so many moments were heightened, amplifying every smile, glance, and frown.

And this is where Faith Erin Hicks shines. She invests so much into Josie and Deja. She wrings so much performance from her characters, and they’re performances that are consistent throughout the book. Deja is the real standout here. She’s a character capable of conveying two emotions on her face at the same time, one for the character she’s talking to and another for the reader. (I love Deja, by the way. She’s the standout character of the book and I can’t get enough of her.)

This is also where it gets really hard to talk about Rowell and Hicks as distinct entities, because these two seem so in-sync, “Pumpkinheads” feels more like the product of a single writer/artist than it does the work of a writer and artist duo. Rowell trusts Hicks to take whole chunks of story and tell it completely through the art. And Hicks has taken all these puns from Rowell and peppered them throughout the backgrounds.

Rowell clearly has a lot of affection for autumnal pumpkin festivals and she’s invested a lot of thought into making this location feel both real and yet exist in a heightened state. As someone that’s never been to a festival like this or even had any knowledge about them prior to reading this book, I couldn’t tell what was taken from real life and what was invented. It was only by listening to SKTCHD’s podcast that I discovered the Pumpkin Bomb was something Rowell created for “Pumpkinheads.” It’s such a fantastic sounding dessert, it feels like it must be real. In fact, I’m hoping people start making these because of “Pumpkinheads.” I might even give it a crack myself.

This is where Hicks is the perfect accomplice for Rowell. She takes all that enthusiasm for worldbuilding and gives it shape. She makes the Pumpkin Bomb 100% convincing. The book’s endpapers have a map of the Pumpkin Patch & Autumn Jamboree, all laid out in such detail that you can follow Josie and Deja’s journey throughout the evening. The logistics of figuring this are mind boggling to me, especially since it’s laid out in such a way that you can see the logic in Josie and Deja’s choices in the map’s layout. It’s details like this that make Rowell and Hicks seem like a single creator. Me being me, I studied the map carefully before beginning the story and even got ahead of a certain plotpoint because of it… I really got a kick out of this.

There’s one other contributor I’ve failed to mention till now, and it’s because this is going to frustrate me. Sarah Stern’s colors in “Pumpkinheads” are fantastic, but all the stuff I like the most I can’t talk about without getting into specifics that give away a little too much. I tried, but my paragraphs got annoyingly vague. Simply put, Stern understands color’s ability to augment emotion.

Purely on a technical level, it’s very satisfying to have a book shift from daylight, to twilight, then finally to evening over the course of the novel. The colors are always in motion, changing subtly. And, given the subject matter, “the end of an era,” it’s thematically appropriate to set the sun on this stage of Josie and Deja’s lives.

Final verdict: 9 – “Pumpkinheads” is an excellent read. . . and an even better reread.