Customer Reviews

Warcraft: Dragon Hunt, Volume 1: Kaplan SAT/ACT Vocabulary-Building Manga (Warcraft: Sunwell Trilogy) (v. 1)

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When I purchased this text for some research on using sequential art (i.e., comics) for teaching, I really wanted to like it. I figured that if a respectable company like Kaplan was using sequential art, then that would be a good step forward.

Unfortunately, this amalgamation of computer game setting, manga illustrations, ACT vocabulary, and narrative art didn't gel. On the high end of accomplishment, the manga drawings are great. Going downhill: the WarCraft setting seems like it would be a smart choice, but it doesn't give any of the satisfaction that the game might give; the vocab definitions are placed visually in a way that seems like it really 'should' work, but the definitions are sketchy at best; and worst of all, the narrative is just rotten---from the dialogue which jolts over speedbumps like "nefarious" coming out of the mouths of characters which, IMHO, would NOT say such things, to the unrelentingly irritating cliff-hanger stopping-point (it does NOT conclude), the story-telling is miserable.

My only hope is that this kind of experimentation won't convince people that sequential art CANNOT be used for sophisticated purposes. Hopefully, people will see it as a sketch of what is possible to accomplish and then go farther. Please....?