My ParaHangover

Characters

Graphic novels are beautiful. Some of the artists are doing truly amazing work worthy of museums. But when you start messing with characters that I already have mental pictures of… things can go horribly wrong for this reader and I start to cringe. This version’s characters from Moon Called was dead on the money for me! The Mercy represented on the cover was exactly how I pictured her in my head from all my reading. The Mercy in the story boards was different but I had absolutely no qualms with her appearance.

Adam Hauptman was a little off for me. It only distracted me briefly in the first scenes but once he got the snot beat out of him (part of the story – don’t think I’m actually ruining anything if you haven’t read the book(s)) he looked better.

My personal favorite character representation? Zee!! But you don’t get a graphic novel to just look at the pictures to see what someone else thought your beloved characters looked like, right? You want to see how close they kept to the story. At least I did.

Story

It’s been maybe two years since I read Moon Called. Surprisingly, I remembered the story well and I could tell that this graphic novel followed the book very closely. Granted, some things were shortened, like fight scenes. Other scenes didn’t quite communicate emotions that the book did, like Zee’s always careful “fae-speak” when dealing with Mercy and how he’s always leery of helping unless absolutely necessary (except he’ll always open the garage). But you don’t miss those in the graphic novel. They just weren’t needed for the graphic novel.

I found myself looking forward to scenes from the book to see how they would be played out in the graphic novel and I was never disappointed. I can’t think of a scene that was missing.

My only qualm was that this book was the collection of the first four individual issues of the graphic novel series. There are more to the story so I was left hanging at the end. I’ve got the next collection on order from another library in Jackson, Michigan (waiting… waiting… waiting…)

Review appears on