Customer Reviews

Marvel Illustrated Moby Dick

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However this experiment ends, you have to give Marvel kudos for attempting to make Moby-Dick a dramatically compelling and suspenseful story. The problem, though, is that the novel already is. You just have to have the 19th Century Romantic kind of bent to enjoy it, and, in this case, I think you've got to have the right kind of creative team to produce a great comic adaptation. Roy Thomas and Pascal Alexie are right there if all you're asking for is the surface adventure of Moby-Dick. The comic starts slow, so slowly that I put it down for a week or two before coming back to it. But I was determined to make the effort to read it. After twenty-two pages the adaptation picks up the story-telling, adventurous pace tremendously. But that 22-page stretch of cold might be a little too long for most folks. But I have to honestly give Roy Thomas credit for that. He keeps the pace of the original tale (as much as you can take a 500 page metaphorically explosive, thematically dense novel and turn it into a six-issue comic series. Another thing that works for this book is the inclusion of some of Melville's tough 19th Century language, and I'm not simply talking about the nautical terminology. For those who make it to the three-day hunt of Moby-Dick, they'll be well rewarded in both entertainment and learning. The great thing about this story is that the action and entertainment keeps picking up pace as the tale strings itself out, eventually getting to the frantic pace of a rope attached to a harpoon in whale's hide that's flying off the boat at 20 nauts a minute. Okay, I'm no sailor folks. That's probably illiterate. Let's just say: This story gets going fast, very fast and wonderfully speedy, towards the ¾ mark. As to the artwork, I'm no great fan of Pascal Alexie. His artwork is half comic realismo, half manga-ish (he's got a foot in several artistic camps); and he turns all of these characters into practically young men which doesn't work for Ahab, in particular. Ahab looks like a movie actor affecting high-style mod, and he's got some giant, jet-black eyebrows that use could use to sop up your extra milk with, I think. Yuck. I also don't like his highly stylized tattooing for Queequeg. What he's done is taken a cartography map's precise designs and stuck them just as precisely on Queequeg. It's not a wit realistic, and it's not native to any race or culture. So we get a modernly cool tatted-up Queequeg instead of anything slightly realistic and/or pertaining to Melville's character. All in all, this creative team barely gets the job done. Personally I'd like to see much more evocatively subtle work for a comic version of Moby-Dick, someone like Eddie Campbell, Bill Sienkiewicz, or Moebius. And the narrative would have to pick up more of the intellectual arguments that are part of the story. The problem is that Marvel is marketing this for a young, in-school audience (probably middle school age), so some of the most intellectually and philosophically fascinating aspects of the work (like Ishmael's opening statement that he is on a suicidal bent, substituting "taking to ship" for "pistol and ball" when he wants to, like Cato, "with a philosophical flourish, throw himself on his sword") cannot be touched upon. For it's target audience, I suppose Marvel's done well. But a truly Melvillian attempt at rendering Moby-Dick into comic form still awaits us.

Having read the original "Moby Dick", I was very impressed with this graphic novelization of the original tale. The artwork in the graphic novel is fantastic and the tale translates great into the comic book format.

I have not enjoyed a graphic novel more so than this. Amazing art with an epic story rounds off this wonderful collection. Great for young minds too fearful of the classic books daunting page count and fun for those revisting the tale. I very much recommend this book!

WARNING: The current discriptiion and ISBN are for Marvel Comics adaption of Moby Dick not the Spider-man Newspaper strips. Do not buy before this is corrected or you will receive the wrong item.