Adrian Deacon
Contributing Writer
We’ve all had a bad day. A day where it feels like everything, and every one, on god’s green earth seems to be against you. Whether it is the vending machine eating your dollar or you lose your job, we as humans will at some point be faced with a time where nothing seems to work in our favor. It’s hard, and it may feel like it’ll never end, and the bad luck will continue regardless of what you do or don’t. This struggle is what Penny Brighton dealt within the pages of Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota’s graphic novel titled Lucky Penny published by Oni Press in 2016. In these pages held a story about life, friendship, love, and best of all, a message that tells us all that it gets better.
Lucky Penny follows the story of Penny Brighton, a young woman in her 20’s who seems to have the worst luck around. It isn’t fantastically corrupt; it’s reasonably common lousy luck or something that we have all either experienced or will experience. In the first few pages, Penny is fired from her job and evicted from her apartment on the same day. The story has her trying to gain some form of stability which ranges from begging to her getting a job at a laundromat to making a makeshift apartment in a friend’s storage unit.
Along the way, she finds new friends, gets a cat, and even falls in love with Walter, a shy young man with his issues with dealing with other people, but through the kind and bright-eyed Penny, he finds someone to help him better himself, and he inadvertently does the same for our protagonist Penny. The two’s relationship is ideal but still flawed; they fight and get back together later on. It’s through the friends she makes along the way, and those around who help change her life for the better. While a trope used in countless forms of storytelling, there’s a reason for it. Her friends come through and help her confront her problems in the climax of the novel, and it’s pretty beautiful.
If there’s one major theme in this novel’s text it’s that no matter how bad it might seem right now, there will always be a tomorrow. That someday your luck will turn around for the better and I think that many college students need that message in their life. Many are struggling through tough times getting an education, trying to balance a family, a job, or even both. What this book tells us is that it gets better over time, and along the way, we need to enjoy ourselves and relax.
We may not know how long we have left on earth, but we can at least enjoy it with those we love. Listen, being in college is hard. It’s stressful, it’s painful, and worst of all, it can feel like the world is always against you. But don’t forget to take at least a minute and stop fretting or panicking over the next semester or a late assignment you forgot to do and relax and do something you enjoy.
After reading this 204-page comic, I can without a doubt say that this is the best feel-good comic book I’ve ever read since reading old school Archie comics from the grocery store. So please, go out and find this book at your local book store, local comic shop, or purchase it via Amazon and enjoy reading a short and sweet tale about a girl down on her luck and her journey to a better life along with her friends both old and new.