Of all the characters we have studied so far, Anita Blake is my favorite. Laurel K. Hamlin's animator and vampire executioner Anita Blake is a tiny little bad ass, and I love powerful female characters. She is a far cry from Bella Swan as far as taking control and refusing to let the men in her life push her around, but at the same time manages to keep her morals and virtue intact, despite the sexual tension that constantly surrounds her.
Rather than reading the actual novel 'Guilty Pleasures', we read the graphic novel version of the story. Although the artwork is beautiful and does a great job depicting Hamlin's colorful descriptions of people and surroundings, it is so good that it tends to be distracting. I also noticed that a lot of the artwork tend to hold inside jokes that only those familiar with the series such as myself would really understand it.
All of the novels are written in first-person, from the view of Anita. The main problem is that Anita has so much internal dialogue that it tends to get lost in the graphic novel form. A prime example is when as Anita is fleeing from Nicolaus, and Jean-Claude sends her the first 'mark', binding her to him and increasing power for both of them. If you haven't read the novel itself, in which Anita describes an eerie blue light flying towards her, and once it attaches itself to her she understands what it is, you would have no idea what is happening in the graphic novel.
Several people pointed out the fact that Anita is constantly surrounded by powerful male figures, making her appear small and weak in the cartoons. Another item that is not well conveyed is that Anita uses her small size and appearance as a weapon, using her enemy's underestimation of her power against them. Many times the men around her are her allies, who usually are willing to take orders from her. In some cases, as with Jean-Claude, her power actually multiplies in his presence due to their sharing of the 'marks'.
All in all, I liked the graphic novel, and it did help draw new ideas on the thoughts I had about this series. But even beautiful pictures cannot truly fulfill the descriptive quality of the written word.
Yes! I felt the same way. The pictures were wonderfully done, but they detracted from the storyline. It was incredibly difficult to concentrate on what was happening because my eyes would naturally drift onto the pictures, ignoring the words.
ReplyDeletereading some of the stuff on the novel really helps you understand what the hell is going on. I skimmed through some dialogue of the novel online and it brings out the characters a lot better.
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