Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys The Big Lie by Anthony Del Col, Werther Dell'Edera

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Well, this was certainly not what I expected! I thought this was a modern take on a couple of series which date back to 1927 (The Hardy Boys) and 1930 (Nancy Drew). In the late seventies, there was a brief and disastrous run on TV featuring both story lines intertwined, but I thought this would be truer to the roots. It was far from that.

I recently reviewed a book about Edward Stratemeyer and his daughters Harriet and Edna, how these series came to be, and who wrote them. It made for an entertaining read, but apart from seeing a TV movie about Nancy drew, I have very little exposure to the actual stories themselves. That's why I thought this might be interesting. I'm sorry to say it wasn't.

the first hint that something was off here was when the Hardy Boys get arrested (apparently out of the blue) for questioning over the death of their father - and the police officer was slapping one of them around. This just felt completely off kilter. It's not to say you can't have a story where a kid is slapped around by a rogue police officer, and it's not to say you can't update an antique story that's badly in need of a make-over and get a better one, but in this case, it felt so out of place and so lacking in rationale and motivation that it kicked the story right out of suspension of disbelief.

It didn't work either, to have this on the one hand and a really old-fashioned style of illustrating the comic book on the other. The two simply didn't work together, especially since the art was lackluster and poorly rendered. I don't know if this was merely in the ebook, which is all we amateur reviewers usually get to see, or if it would have been just as bad in the print version, but the art was poorly delineated, scrappy, sketchy, muddy, and drab. Overall, the the experience was a poor one, and I could not stand to read past the half-way point in this story. Based on what I read, I cannot recommend it.

Kill Shakespeare: The Mask of Night by Anthony Del Col

Title:
Kill Shakespeare: The Mask of Night
Author: Anthony Del Col
Publisher: IDW
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by the author. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is sometimes reward aplenty!

This graphic novel appears to be mainly Hamlet & Juliet (given the cast), with some Othello thrown in, but considering the immense amount of blood-letting and violence, it was far more like Titus Andronicus than ever it was like any other Shakespeare play.

I wasn't able to follow it. For one thing, The language was wrong, with expressions from different eras getting mixed together such as, for example, one sentence which read: "You hold thy belly"! Say what?

There was - in my ARC - no title page or preliminary pages giving writer/artist/publisher, or other information. It appeared to start in the middle of a story, which made it look like pages were missing, or like this was a continuation from a previous volume which I've not read. Which of those it was, I have no idea.

I tried to get into the story and follow it, but it was nonsensical to me. There was no story as such, that I could discern. It was just an endless fight, either verbally between crew (it was set on a pirate ship being pursued by a ship of cannibals, apparently) or violently with swords, cudgels, daggers, etc. The character's idea of a good exchange was to attack someone and preferably end the 'conversation' by ripping out their heart and stamping on it.

It wasn't interesting or intelligible and I cannot recommend it. Letting Shakespearean characters run rampant outside the confines of their particular play, and interact with each other is a great idea, but that wasn't evident in this particular work.