Graphic Review

[easol.livejournal.com]

Which was just posted on amazon.com. It doesn't bother much with the story, as with the adaptation and the artwork, which I personally found... well, just read if you want my thoughts, perchance. And be relatively gentle with me, because this is only a first draft -- any constructive criticism will be hugged and tucked in with a teddy bear.

PS. Edited.

Title: Guilty!
Ranking: 2 Stars


Once upon a time, before the Anita Blake series became cheap porn with well-endowed vampires and werethingies, there was "Guilty Pleasures."

And like many a successful fantasy/horror novel before it, Laurell K. Hamilton's breakout story has been adapted into graphic novel form, with "Guilty Pleasures, Vol. 1" compiling the first six issues. The results... are mixed. It comes across as a goth teen's daydreams, wrapped in indifferent artwork that doesn't seem quite to match the storyline.

The story: Anita Blake is a vampire hunter and an animator, able to raise zombies from the dead. She also isn't too fond of vampires or weres, though St. Louis is swarming with them. So when a vampire comes to hire her, she turns him down. But at a bachelorette party, she soon finds herself hip-deep in vampire politics -- and a dangerous enemy who is trying to kill her.

Things only get more complicated when she ends up facing the Master of the City, the deceptively childlike Nikolaos, and a dungeon full of wererats. To find who is offing vampires in St. Louis, she'll need to relax her "no vamps" rule -- and join forces with the mysterious, seductive Jean-Claude.

The graphic novel is pretty faithful to the original novel, sticking closely to the storyline of the original novel -- lots of lines like "You don't have to be undead to be evil, but it helps." Stacie M. Ritchie and then Jess Ruffner provide some pretty good adaptation of the first-person dialogue, which is never easy.

But... a big but...

A graphic novel is more than its words -- it's art too. Brett Booth has done some great artwork in the past, but he doesn't seem to have his heart in this one. It's decent artwork, admittedly -- bright colours, detail, well-drawn in general. It's the little details that make it silly, including the mangaish illustrations (Anita's GIANT lips) in a realistically-drawn comic.

In fact, these become more prominent as the comic proceeds. Often the action described doesn't match the illustrations (while thinking, "I'm not a coward," Anita huddles down and wrings her hands). And we get other visual quirks, like giant thick thighs -- they pop up on lots of people like Anita and the rat king, but Madge's enormous thunder thighs (each is thicker than her waist) are the funniest thing in the whole book.

Anita Blake herself is the most comically drawn -- she's as pale as an albino, except she has ridiculously flowing curly hair; it's always falling coyly over her eyes, and occasionally it drapes itself a good six inches in front of her face. Perhaps as a reflection of Booth's own mood, she also always looks bored -- even when she's supposed to be screaming with terror, she looks like she's yawning.

Nor does it help that Jean-Claude looks exactly like a breastless Anita, right down to the albino skin and artificially flowing hair. The other characters don't fare that well either: Bert looks like a blond Frankenstein's Monster, Philip looks like he's covered with herpes, Edward looks like a perv, and Nikolaos looks like a Disney heroine, which I don't think was the intention.

"Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures" takes on a fairly amusing book, and transforms it into a tepid graphic novel. Interesting for completists, but an exercise in lackluster art for all others.