Thor Ragnarok by Jim McCann

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a Disney-style audiobook based on the Marvel Movie of the same name. While I detest Disney's all-powerful mega-corporation status, and their lack of credit for the work people do on books like this, I do confess I'm a fan of the Marvel movies, and I was curious as to what they had done with this story which was aimed at younger children. In this case, the rewrite of the movie script was credited - to comic book author Jim McCann and the reading to narrator MacLeod Andrews who did a fine job.

It tells the story of Thor's battle against the Ragnarok beast, thinking he's won when he hasn't, of his return to Asgard to discover his mischievous stepbrother Loki has been impersonating Odin, and Odin's death, which permits the imprisoned sister Hela (whom Thor never knew he had) back into the world, and of her fight to take over Asgard and Thor's resistance to it - after he escapes confinement on a planet where the 'owner' captures tough visitors to make them fight one another for entertainment. It features the Hulk, and Valkyrie - an estimable addition to the Marvel pantheon of heroic women.

Apart from being tamed appropriately (and having some portions changed more than seemed necessary) it stuck to the story in the movie so it would make a decent read for young children who for whatever reason are not allowed to see the movie. So I commend this as a worthy listen.

Mind the Gap Volume 1 Intimate Strangers by Jim McCann

Title: Mind the Gap
Author: Jim McCann
Publisher: Image Comics
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 Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Gorgeously illustrated by Rodin Esquejo and Sonia Oback.

Mind the Gap - volume one of what is now a several volume series - didn't leave much of an impression on me! When I came to write a review a few days after I'd read it, I could remember almost nothing about it except for how gorgeous the artwork - by Rodin Esquejo and Sonia Oback - was. It was that kind of a story - or that kind of a lack of a story to be absolutely precise.

One thing which did stick with me was how intransigent this volume was on the iPad in Bluefire Reader. It was really hard to read because it was sometimes all but impossible to to actually turn a page! Sometimes you could swipe and it would slide across, other times it wouldn't move. Sometimes you could tap to the right and it would slide across, but again, other times it would not move.

If you go to the very beginning of the book - which was not, believe it or not, the front cover, and then try to have the menu bar slide down from the top, it will not appear. You have to swipe two pages to the front cover (assuming that works) to get to a point where you can tap the top of the pad to get the menu bar to appear so you can then return to the library! This was not pleasant reading experience at all. It was in fact so frustrating trying to get the pages to turn that it really detracted from the story.

The basic premise is that main character Elle is evidently dead - or perhaps dreaming, or in a coma. Who or what killed her? Elle finds that she can inhabit other people's living bodies but not her own. Why? She doesn't know.

Other than that, there's some random dude wandering around with a cell phone, and random people doing random things. I looked for a story but there wasn't one to be found, and whatever passed for it was forgotten pretty much as soon as I finished reading.

If you want a great picture book, then this is it, but if you want a story, you're wasting your time here. I don't read novels, graphic or otherwise, for the artwork! I like a real story, too, and it's especially important to keep this in mind in the graphic formats.

Zombies Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Title: Zombies Christmas Carol
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Marvel
Rating: WORTHY!

Adaptation by Jim McCann
Penciling David Baldeon and Jeremy Treece
Inking Jordi Tarragona and Roger Bonet
Coloring Ferran Daniel and Jorge Gonzalez
Lettering Jeff Eckleberry

This is exactly what the title says (for once!) - a straight adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol into graphic novel format, with a dash (or more accurately, a stagger) of zombies tossed in, and I have to say that it worked!

I'm not a fan at all of zombie stories (or vampire or werewolf as long as we're covering certain animistic supernatural plots), but this one actually wasn't repulsive to me at all.

The novel carries a parental advisory, FYI, but there really isn't anything in it that need be kept from any well-adjusted, everyday teen - nothing that they wouldn't see, for example, on your average gaming card. In fact, by zombie story standards, this one was relatively tame.

The beauty of it lies in the way it was adapted, and Jim McCann did a sterling job there, bringing the zombies in and making them threatening without any really overt violence or gore. They're not overwhelming, either - just a background, really, to Scrooge's story, which largely follows the original, but which is adjusted here and there to fit the zombie story into it.

Zombies and Christmas might not seem like a natural fit, but what the heck? Sometimes you want to down-shift at Christmas and try something new, or at least, different instead of blindly following all those same old traditions again this year like you did every other year. This story fits the bill, and I recommend it.