- Abadzis, Nick.
Laika.
New York: First Second, 2007.
ISBN 978-1-59643-101-0.
-
The first living creature to orbit the Earth (apart,
perhaps, from bacterial stowaways aboard Sputnik 1) was a tough,
even-tempered, former stray dog from the streets of
Moscow, named Kudryavka (Little Curly), who was renamed
Laika
(Barker) shortly before being sent on a one-way mission
largely motivated by propaganda concerns and with only the
most rudimentary biomedical monitoring in a slapdash capsule
thrown together in less than a month.
This comic book (or graphic novel, if you prefer) tells
the story through parallel narratives of the lives of
Sergei
Korolev, a former inmate of Stalin's gulag in Siberia who
rose to be Chief Designer of the Soviet space program,
and Kudryavka, a female part-Samoyed stray who was
captured and consigned to the animal research section of the
Soviet Institute of Aviation Medicine (IMBP). While
obviously part of the story is fictionalised, for example
Kudryavka's origin and life on the street, those parts of
the narrative which are recorded in history are presented
with scrupulous attention to detail. The author goes so
far as to show the Moon in the correct phase in events
whose dates are known precisely (although he does admit
frankly to playing fast and loose with the time of
moonrise and moonset for dramatic effect). This is a
story of survival, destiny, ambition, love, trust,
betrayal, empathy, cruelty, and politics, for which
the graphic format works superbly—often telling
the story entirely without words. For decades
Soviet propaganda spread deception and confusion about Laika's
fate. It was only in 2002 that Russian sources became
available which revealed what actually happened, and
the account here presents the contemporary consensus
based upon that information.
March 2008 