Thankfully, for those of us who like to read across genres and formats, a lot of really excellent novels have found their stories continued or supplemented or prequeled (I’m a writer, I’m allowed to make up words) by comics. V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic has The Steel Prince. Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London has… other Rivers of London but with pictures. Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars got an extended ending in its manga adaptation. You get the point.

However, the reverse isn’t nearly as common. We don’t typically see a comicsverse that benefits from having canon material added in novel form. In fairness, it’s much easier to add visuals to a story than it is to make up for their absence with more words. When readers are used to visual cues, to having descriptions emphasized with action and dialogue with facial expressions, to having a story presented with integrated art, it’s almost impossible to flesh out anything else in the universe without that art.

Despite that, Sarah Rees Brennan does it with Fence: Striking Distance.

I love this little universe created by C.S. Pacat and Johanna the Mad, which on paper isn’t something that would normally catch my fancy. The first three volumes of Fence (and, I assume, future volumes) follow the fencing team at King’s Row Academy as they try to take the state championship from the more highly ranked Exton. There is, of course, also scads of personal drama because… it’s an all-boys boarding school.

Nicholas is new to King’s Row; he’s a scholarship student with a ton of raw talent and the son of a famous fencer who doesn’t even know Nicholas exists (and who has another son upon whom he’s placed all his hopes). Seji Katayma, said son’s ex-fencing partner, is trying to make his own way in the world – though he struggles to make friends and to enjoy anything other than school work and fencing. There’s also Aiden, the playboy who’s secretly in love with someone he doesn’t think he can have, and Harvard, the team captain and Aiden’s best friend who gives so much he doesn’t have anything left for himself.

Could you read Striking Distance without having read at least some of the Fence comics? Probably not, but that has less to do with the change of format and more to do with the fact that Rees Brennan doesn’t spend a ton of time backtracking. Honestly, though, I’m not sure you’d want to jump into this story in the middle anyway. To have any emotional attachment to the events of the novel, you need to have formed a bond with the characters, and although that’s relatively easy to do with Nicholas and Harvard, both Seji and Aiden are… acquired tastes. Rees Brennan’s novel does a lot to deepen the bond readers have with both, but the foundation needs to be established going in.

As to how Rees Brennan successfully adapts the visual-linguistic combination to a words-only project: very skillfully. I know, it sounds like a dad joke, but bear with me. By reserving the space many authors would use to backtrack or reminisce for sensory description, Rees Brennan gives the reader sufficient cues to allow their imagination to fill in the gaps left by the absence of art. The manner in which she describes the reflection of light on an epeé or the folds of a shirt, the exact pattern of the rubber ducks on the curtain that divides Seji and Nicholas’s room in half, the color of a replacement watch face, the way a bonfire heats a space unevenly is both precise and fluid, careful and open-ended.

She also has a way of making characters who, in the hands of another, would be tropes. Her characters are multifaceted, multilayered, and aware of their flaws and confusion. The oldest of these boys is 17 and, even if their lives have been difficult in some ways, they’re still, with the exception of Nicholas, relatively privileged. But they’re still learning how to live in the world.

Hell, they’re still learning how to be people and, even if they’re fundamentally decent, they’re going to screw up. To write them any other way would be dishonest and unfair to Striking Distance‘s target audience: tweens and teens who, as we’ve covered on many previous occasions, are way smarter than most adults think they are.

As an adult reading Striking Distance, I had some cringey moments remembering what an idiot I was when I was 17, but is that necessarily a bad thing? My son is graduating into those tween years, and I think maybe it’s good for me to be reminded of how hard it was to realize I had no idea who I was or what I was supposed to be doing or how I was supposed to relate to people I’d known my whole life. Maybe I can ease his transition a little. Or at the very least not make it harder.

On the world is horrible and I hate everything level? I absolutely adore these trashfire boys, and I love them even more now and yay for a few hours of joy.

Fence: Striking Distance by Sarah Rees Brennan drops September 29, 2020 from Little Brown for Young Readers.