Customer Reviews

Guards! Guards!

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I just want to let you all know that you don't have to pay 75 Ankh Morpork or US dollars for this b-OOOK! (ahem) book. The soft cover version is available (at least in April 2009) from amazon in Canada at amazon.ca. I got my copy of the b-oook for 16 dollars plus shipping. The shipping was faster than I thought it'd be. Just select regular shipping.

A nice job of illustration here. One excellent swamp dragon. The artist has pretty much captured the right feel for the usual silly Pratchett story about bumbling incompetence, and sheer luck, and other such things. How do a bunch of completely useless cops stop a dragon, and an evil politician and a summoning cult? Luckily they do have some help.

This graphic novel of Terry Pratchett's Discworld book "Guards! Guards!" is certainly adequate as an adaptation of the original story, maintaining the original plot structure and characters, but I found the illustration style singularly distracting. Of course, we all have our own ideas about how characters in favorite novels should look, and for the most part I have been satisfied with the way that various illustrators have depicted the many inhabitants of Discworld. But for the most part I found the illustrations in the present volume just too, well, cartoonish. Terry Pratchett over the years has succeeded brilliantly in making a fundamentally ridiculous fantasy universe seem supremely real, but the illustrations in this graphic novel destroys much of that seeming reality. The streets and buildings of Ankh-Morpork as seen here are fine -- quite convincing -- but the characters themselves are mostly refugees from a cheap comic book. Sam Vimes? Sergeant Colon? Lance-Corporal (and soon to be Captain) Carrot? Nope -- they cannot look like this.