The Errant Æsthete

In a description that promises a story that “will speak straight to your heart,” Nick Abadzis’s graphic novel “Laika” is a haunting, sweet biography of the first dog in space, who died five hours after she was launched on Russia’s Sputnik II during the Cold War. Both heartwarming and factually sound in a story that goes from “the stacks of the British Library to Korolev’s house in Moscow”], this heartbreaking book left one reader to wonder: “To think that the death of a stray dog unknown to me and back fifty years in the past could make my heart hurt so badly certainly attests to the remarkable job British artist-writer Nick Abadzis has accomplished.” (source)