Unlike the previously reviewed
comic-book adaptation this one has a clear purpose in mind: "WHAT BETTER
WAY THAN BEAUTIFYL COMICS ART TO GET THE KIDS EXCITED ABOUT READING?" asks
the over excited forward (the allcaps is their idea); and considering the work
came out in the long-ago time of 1998 (eons in internet time – this is before
sparknotes or the Google search engine) kids who wanted to cheat in English
class had to read (or watch) something to know the gist of the story.
This story also boasts
far better creative team – the whole thing being the work of comics-great Will
Eisner. To those not versed in the field we will just say that he his comics
version of Orson Wells – a man whose work transformed the medium, a genius in
form and content, the creator of the "Graphic Novel" and man whose
name is used by most prestigious award of the comics industry (The Eisner
Awards). It is important to remember all of those accolades because almost none
of them apply to the wreak that is Eisner's Moby Dick.
It is hard to know who
to blame – whether the editors of the artist decided on this impossible format
– the whole of Moby Dick Shrunk down to 32 pages (!) (the marvel comics
version was six times as long and still cut much of the novel out). This cannot
be done, you might as well try to adapt the story to form of (a single)
paper-mache. Eisner goes about this task heroically: choosing a dense and
strict six-panel grid with text often coming from above or below the penal (a
favorite style of Eisner, and one very few tried besides him); you cannot blame
this version for lacking a sense of identity. But you can blame it for
everything else – replacing Melville words with plain prose adds nothing and
detrects a lot, every character has been stripped from personality down to
basic function (this guy commands, this guy throws a harpoon, this one makes
grave predictions) – they exists to perform the actions Melville gave them but
there is no justification to them no exploration.
What
we have he is the clip notes version –
beautifully illustrated clip notes, but clip notes none-the-less. And as
for it stated aim – it is hard to believe any kid (or adult) reading this
without knowing the original and deciding to give it a read: the story seems
primitive and simple and novel would even lack the good artwork; if this was my
introduction to Moby Dick it would have been the first and last I would
now of it. If you want you get children today to read you give an urban-fantasy
story which involves teens from our world crossing over into a magical reality
(see- Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Percy Jackson etc…) or something about girls
in a forbidden romance with a vampires (and those works demonstrate perfectly
the just because something is a book it is not culturally superior to computer
games, television or gum chewing). What you don't do is give them this version
of Moby Dick.
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