Selected Book
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures, Vol. 1 (Graphic Novel)
- Hardcover
- Author: Laurell K. Hamilton
- Artist: Stacie M. Ritchie, Brett Booth
- Publisher: Marvel Books
- Release Date: July 2007
- ISBN-10: 0785127232
- ISBN-13: 9780785127239
- List Price: $19.99
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryNew York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton brings Anita Blake to the world of graphic novels. Anita Blake lives in a world where vampires, zombies and werewolves have been declared legal citizens of the United States. Anita Blake is an "animator" - a profession that involves raising the dead for mourning relatives. But Anita is also known as a fearsome hunter of criminal vampires, and she's often employed to investigate cases that are far too much for conventional police. But as Anita gains the attention of the vampire masters of her hometown of St. Louis, she also risks revealing an intriguing secret about herself - the source of her unusual strength and power. This hardcover edition contains an all-new, original, never-before-published short story by Laurell K Hamilton. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Perfect transfer
Rating:
Some books suck when they become comic books. Others were born to be made into a graphic novel. Laurell K. Hamilton's works are hit or miss with me. I either hate the way things turn out or I love it.
I think if I had been exposed to her works via the graphic novels I would have loved them all. Anita Blake comes out as a more realistic, living, butt-kicking character. True, she has this problem with her hair - is it haunted? And frankly I didn't picture her as having an hour-glass figure. She seems too tiny for it. But the artwork is nice and this graphic novel, only about half of the story, follows the novel perfectly.
Give it a go. You will not be disappointed.
Guilty!
Rating:
Once upon a time, before the Anita Blake series became cheap porn with surreally well-endowed vampires and werethingies, there was "Guilty Pleasures."
And like many a successful fantasy/horror novel before it, Laurell K. Hamilton's breakout horror/fantasy story has been adapted into graphic novel form, with "Guilty Pleasures, Vol. 1" compiling the first six issues of her first novel. The results... are not so good. Slack-paced and self-indulgent, it comes across as a goth teen's daydreams, wrapped in indifferent artwork that doesn't seem quite to match the storyline.
Anita Blake is a vampire hunter and an animator, able to raise zombies from the dead. Nickname: the Executioner. She also isn't too fond of vampires or werecreatures, even though St. Louis is swarming with them. So when a vampire acquaintance comes to hire her, she turns him down. But at a bachelorette party, she soon finds herself hip-deep in vampire politics -- and a dangerous enemy who is trying to kill her.
Things only get more complicated when she ends up facing the Master of the City, the deceptively childlike Nikolaos, and a dungeon full of wererats. To find who is offing vampires in St. Louis, she'll need to relax her "no vamps" rule -- and join forces with the mysterious, seductive Jean-Claude. But as she investigates further, she finds herself delving into the dark world of vampires, and the "freaks" that worship them....
This graphic novel is pretty faithful to the original novel, sticking closely to Hamilton's storyline -- which admittedly is tough, since the whole mystery is only pursued in random fits and starts. Stacie M. Ritchie and then Jess Ruffner provide some pretty good adaptation of the first-person dialogue ("You don't have to be undead to be evil, but it helps"), which is never easy.
But... a big but...
A graphic novel is more than its words -- it's art too. Brett Booth has done some decent artwork in the past, but he doesn't seem to have his heart in this one, perhaps because Hamilton oversaw the entire process. Parts of it are decent at the core, but the little details make it silly, including the cartoonish illustrations (Anita's GIANT lips, which make Angelina Jolie's look positively skinny) in a realistically-drawn comic.
In fact, these become more prominent as the comic proceeds. Often the action described doesn't match the illustrations (while thinking, "I'm not a coward," Anita huddles down and wrings her hands). And we get other visual quirks, like giant thick thighs -- they pop up on lots of people like Anita and the rat king, but Madge's enormous thunder thighs (each is thicker than her waist) are the funniest thing in the whole book.
Anita Blake herself is the most comically drawn -- she's as pale as an albino, has ultra-red lips, and ridiculously curly hair. The hair is the biggest distraction since it's always snaking down over her eyes and occasionally drapes itself six inches in front of her face. And her personality cannot make up for the artwork -- she acts less like a tough, gutsy vampire hunter and more like a sulky Hot Topic teenager. Her "tough" one-liners, which she lobs at all the wrong people, don't hurt this impression.
Perhaps as a reflection of Booth's own mood, our doughty, not-too-bright protagonist also always looks bored -- even when pinned to the ground by a vampire, she looks incredibly bored. Worse, her eye-rolling facial contortions make her look even more alien.
Nor does it help that Jean-Claude looks exactly like a breastless Anita, right down to the pasty chalk-white skin and artificially flowing black hair. That might be okay, if he had a personality beyond "sexy French dude." The other characters don't fare that well either: Bert looks like a blond Frankenstein's Monster, Philip looks like he's covered with herpes, and the deadly Edward looks like a wide-eyed pervert. And the lethal Nikolaos looks like a Disney heroine, which I don't think was the intention.
"Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures" takes on a mildly entertaining fantasy book, and transforms it into a thoroughly tepid graphic novel. Interesting for completists, but an exercise in lackluster art for all others.
Anita in Comic book
Rating:
The tough as nails Vampire hunter we loved in Guilty Pleasures is here in full color.
The first 6 comic books as one in Hard Back cover... What else can you ask for?
The next 6 of course.
Here we are introduced with Jean Claude, Aubrey, Nikolaos and Death himself - meaning of course Edward - in the freak party...
Hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
The Worst Comic I Have Ever Read
Rating:
I hate to do this for many reasons. One, because this book was expensive. Two, because I liked Guilty Pleasures as a novel. Three, because I'm already considering giving up on the "Anita Blake" series altogether, and this comic adaptation just made me more convinced that I should. What I'm trying to say is that... regrettably, this is the single worst comic I have ever read.
This nicely bound hardcover collects the first six issues of Laurell K. Hamilton's first "Anita Blake" novel. The way it is adapted makes me feel like Stacie Ritchie, the woman who adapted the novel into a comic script, doesn't know the first thing about comics. Instead of letting the art tell the story, she bogs it down with repetitive dialogue and countless narration captions that simply did not need to be included. The novel was in first-person, so had a lot of narration, but when one adapts a story into a different medium (comics especially) the internal narration has to be cut down extensively. But Ritchie goes to all lengths to include absolutely every bit of Anita's thoughts in here, which make it a chore to pull the story out of this. It's basically the novel "Guilty Pleasures" with horrid art. There was no effort at all to make this work as a comic book.
The art, no matter how you look at it, is simply inexcusable. Anita's legs are the size of tree trunks. Other characters have legs that are twice as long as their upper bodies (no joke). The colorist did a fair job in working around Brett Booth's mind-numbingly awful pencil work, but there is simply no saving this book. The art amps up the melo-drama of this story, making an enjoyable novel into a campy comic book with the cheesiest looking vampires this side of Count Chocula.
After trying time and time again to force myself to enjoy this comic, I had to admit I hated it. There was a glimmer of hope towards the end, as there is an original short story included called "Vampire Victim" that is written by Laurell K. Hamilton and her husband, but again, the whole thing comes off as utterly amateur. I'll never read another Marvel adaption of an "Anita Blake" novel, because the creative team behind this comic simply has no idea how comics function. I'll give original "Anita Blake" comics one more shot (because I already have The First Death, but unless that book shows a catastrophic improvement, this series as a whole should be buried and forgotten.
0/10
Loved It!
Rating:
I hadn't even read any of Ms. Hamilton's books until I saw there was a comic book out about Anita Blake. So I read a few novels and then bought this graphic novel and must say it stay very true to the story and the artwork is wonderful. Personally I love the characters, and feel they were well drawn and well represented.
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