Guilty!
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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, perhaps because Hamilton oversaw the entire process. It's decent at the core, but the little details make it silly, including the cartoonish 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 curly hair; it's always snaking down over her eyes, and occasionally it drapes itself six inches in front of her face. Perhaps as a reflection of Booth's own mood, she also always looks bored -- even when pinned to the ground by a vampire, she looks incredibly bored. Worse, her facial contortions make her look even more alien.
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 playground 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.
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Entertaining
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I have been a fan of the Anita Blake novels for a long time now and I was very keen to see how my favourite characters would translate to the graphic novel format. I was pleasantly surprised, the artwork is very good if a little unvaried. For example, Anita has about 3 facial expressions and the same picture is repeated sometimes even on the same page. The representations of favourite characters have obviously been crafted with love and fans of the series will enjoy lots of little details like the captions of Anita's penguin themed t-shirts for example (wonder where I can get one of those!).
In terms of story line I did find that in a few places the action jumped in a way that wasn't entirely intuitive and made me wonder whether someone unfamiliar with the story would be able to follow it or not. Overall though I would say that this is a very interesting graphic novelisation and I am looking forward to the release of the concluding volume.
Reading this graphic novel at the same time as the latest novel ("Harlequin", which I bought at the same time) only served to highlight how much better the early stories were compared to the series as it is now. I can see how the comic book Anita will have plenty of scope for action and adventure that will translate well to graphic form at least up until about book 10. After that I can't see how it can continue to work. Let's hope Marvel keep bankrolling this project that long!
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So when's the movie comming out?
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I'm not really into anything Marvel, I'm more of a DC girl myself but when I heard about my favorite novel series; Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter was geing released in comic form I immediatly bought it as soon as I physically could.
As a big comic book fan and also a heavy reader of many genres of novels, I'm always a bit dubious when it comes to cross overs. Namely my beloved comic books being turned into movies, directed by someone who did a few good movies, then made the movie-comic book crossover one absolutely dire.
But what about when a novel series becomes a comic book?
For anyone who has read most of the Anita Blake series, you'll probably have your own idea in your head of what you think the characters look like from the descriptions written by L.K.H. My idea's of what the characters looked like differs from the characters drawn in this graphic novel obviously, but not so much that it has you critisizing every single image saying; "That's not right, why didn't they do this instead?"
That asides. It is nice to see artwork that has been OK'd by L.K.H. herself and slightly quells that "I don't really like what I'm seeing" thought you may have as it partially did with me. I still have conflicting thoughts on what Anita herself looks like in my head compared to what I see in this graphic novel. I actually pictured her less "Birthing Hips," less muscular thighs and so on, but also pictured her with a bit more colour to her skin. Not white near enough.
Needless to say. This graphic novel follows a good few chapters of "Guilty Pleasures" well and makes a nice and interesting change to actually see some fantastic artists produce really stunning work. The line work is neat where it needs to be, the colouring is quite nice even though I still have my own personal reservations about it. Other than that, an enjoyable read.
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