Monday, January 7, 2013

Book #1


Ender's Shadow Ultimate Collection. By Mike Carey, Sebastian Fiumara, and Guilia Brusco. Based on the novel by Orson Scott Card.

Like the Ender's Game adaptation, this book was broken into a pair of 5-issue mini-series, Battle School and Command School. And like the other adaptation, I wonder if someone unfamiliar with the source material would be lost. But that having been said, the story is terrific, and this adaptation moves at a very nice pace. 

Mike Carey is an excellent writer, both of comic books and of novels. The Unwritten series that he co-created and writes is one of the best ongoing series today. His scripts (and Sebastian Fiumara's art) in this series manage to walk the fine line of respecting the basic story of the novel, while turning that novel into a solid series of comic book issues. Each issue contains a readable part of the story, and the cliffhangers keep the pages turning.

The art is fantastic in this book. Bean looked nothing like I imagined him from listening to the audio version of the novel, but his character design was great. Drawing young children regularly trips up even the best comic book artists, and they often end up simply looking like downsized adults. But Fiumara does an excellent job making the children look like children.

As I wrote in the review of the prior series, adaptations are notoriously inconsistent affairs. But these 20 issues have told this story very well, and I look forward to digging more into the comics, as I continue reading the novels.

source: public library.

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