Reading Manga On The Kindle: Maximum Ride Review

While the Kindle has kept me from being buried alive by my books, the comics and manga just keep rolling in. For as long as I have owned my Kindle, I have dreamed of reading manga on it. I live in Manhattan in a teeny-tiny studio. Similar to many urban bookworms, I fight a loosing battle with available space for new books.  Every purchase is bittersweet because I don’t really have any place to put these acquisitions.  Manga purchases though are the worst because while I love the printed format, I only get about a half hour’s worth of enjoyment out of something that will take up space on my shelves indefinitely.  I would have loved for the Kindle to have been able to come in and be my savior.  Alas, not yet.

There are obvious reasons to be skeptic of Amazon’s e-reader as a platform for manga.  The artwork after all is the most powerful and compelling component of visual storytelling, and on the grainy screen of the Kindle 1 and 2 the fine ink strokes of an artist’s hand are not likely to translate well.  But when I stumbled upon the first volume of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride the Manga in the Kindle store, I still bought it without a moment’s hesitation.  I just had to give this a try.

I’m not going to really review the story itself this time.  As Maxiumum Rise is a graphic novel adaptation of James Patterson’s YA noveland I haven’t read the prose of Maximum Ride yet, I don’t feel like I could comment on it fairly.  The initial attraction for me was that here was the first manga that I had seen for the Kindle published and it was published by Yen Press.  I really love that house.  Though they come no where close to the volume that is manga giant Tokyopop, they’ve always put out a consistent and original line.  Small as they were in the beginning, they’ve taken some rather daring risks and I really respect them for that.  But that’s a convo for another day.  I could gush about Yen Press for quite some time.

I had little difficulty falling into the action of reading the manga over the e-reader.  I’ve been a web-comic reader for years so the idea of reading comics over a computer device is not all that unnatural.  To the Kindle’s credit I wouldn’t say the reading experience was horrible, but it does have a ways yet to climb.  It was much better than I expected. The scenes were reasonably clear and my eyes followed the story panel by panel without much stumbling.  The only confusion occurred whenever there was combat involved because the dialog got completely lost in the action. To fit on the Kindle screen, the image has to be reduced from what you would ordinarily see in a printed tpb.  That made for some very tiny type.  And though I have artificially perfect vision, my eyes really strained to make sense of what might as well have been kanji for all I could tell in places.  Now on a 1st generation Kindle I could not zoom in on the picture in order to enlarge the type.  To be fair though, the 1st generation really wasn’t designed to support graphic novels.  There have been other articles claiming that significant improvement was made n the second generation to better allow for manga and graphic novels.  And I believe you can zoom in, though don’t quote me on that.

I had to really struggle to read this volume and I definitely put in more than a half hour in order to do it.  I enjoyed it however, despite the challenges, but I’m not convinced yet that the Kindle is the place where the digital comics revolution is going to occur.  I would consider buying more comics for my Kindle; however, if a series grew into a property that I well and truly loved, I would likely switch back to paper for that line.  If you feel differently though, let me know and be sure to check out Tumor when it first pubs exclusively for the Kindle through Archaia with a HC run to follow. The first issue will be reportedly free, with the seven subsequent issues priced at .99 a piece.

/End of Line

~ L.

Thoughts on The Wheel of Time Comic

Now that The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World is officially underway, I wanted to chime in on the graphic novel. I hesitated when Issue #0 was released because it really wouldn’t have been fair to weigh in on what is essentially just a pair of side stories to the main event. Issue #0 uses an ordinary day in Egwene’s life to introduce us briefly to the three boys Mat, Perrin, and Rand as well as some of the superstitions, lore, and history of the Two Rivers and the Westlands at large. The material included the Prologue to The Eye of the World and a very basic summation of the world after the breaking. All of it is important information, but arguably not necessary to get into the abridged story being told in graphic novel. (I say abridged not to presume that a lot is going to get left out by the Dabel Brothers’s adaptation, but let’s face it, there is no way to wholly translate a scope of work as large and as rich as The Wheel of Time into this format.)

A few of my friends have been confused by Issue #0 and Egwene’s POV because it isn’t a part of the books that they have read. This is not new content, but an adaptation of an extra chapter that was written and included in the YA packaging of The Eye of the World: From the Two Rivers. The chapter was called “Ravens”  in case you didn’t know and want to look it up. I think it was a good decision to treat the prologue in this manner and use Egewene’s story as a plot device to introduce the reader to that past and present in one act. Issue #0 was okay, but it didn’t quite satisfy the fangirl in me. Anyway, I finally had the chance to read Issue #1 this weekend. SQUEE! Now I am a happy fangirl. I’m flipping every page, waiting to see who pops up next and what they look like while drawing strange looks from everyone at the comic store as I’m choking back giggles. That was the experience I was waiting for. 

I’m still not entirely in love with the art style.  We’ll see if it grows on me over time.  The comic preserves most of the important character traits which I appreciated.  Rand towers above the Two River folks, Perrin does have very broad shoulders.  Moiraine though is a good bit taller than I pictured her to be, but otherwise my favorite of the cast that has been introduced so far.  The first issue also did a nice job of keeping the attention on the world rather than just the important players.  As Rand and Tam roll in to Edmond’s Field with the apple brandy you get to see  the things that are going on around them in preparation for Beltine such as Cenn badgering Mayor Brann about the lack of storks or a Coplin getting hen-pecked by his wife.  Rand is often in the foreground of panels which is fitting because right now, he’s not what’s important.  

Adapters Chuck Dixon and Chase Conley are taking their time with the pacing and aren’t rushing through the story in so far.  Thom hasn’t even been introduced yet.  Honestly, I expected it to be a rush job and Issue #1 to close with Narg in the kitchen, but then the end product would not have been nearly as nice.  The original New Spring comic left me with a lot of doubts, but I think this could shape up to be a good adaptation.  I worry, however, that comics fan might not pick it up and/or stick with the story.   True to novel-form, it will be a slow build.  I hope though that the series is successful enough to motivate Dabel to keep to a consistent and reasonable production schedule.

Watchmen Bento!?

What the fork?  I am disturbed and yet oddly enough, very hungry.

 

 

 

     Found on Bento Challenge

Who was not watching the Watchmen?

Me, because I’m in graduate school hell right now. Grrrr.

Anyway, I09 reports that Watchmen pulled in $25.1 million on it’s first day so I assume a number of you did make it out to the theaters. Surprisingly though, when looking for reactions to the movie the blogosphere seems to be unusually quiet and scattered on the subject. MTV’s article pretty much sums it up, Watchmen Reviews Are In: Everyone Disagree’s! No one camp seems to be larger than the other.

Over on Rotten Tomatoes the movie has only a 65% rating. The comments are pretty well mixed up across the entire spectrum, and as always when it comes to fan movies and Rotten Tomatoes hilarity ensues.

However, most of the blogs I’ve read have been reasonably favorable. I haven’t found anyone gushing over the movie, but the general feeling is that Snyder did a -decent- job of adapting the movie. They acknowledge that the movie is flawed, but let’s face it, we all knew it couldn’t be perfect. Watchmen is so dense with supplementary material and abstract nuances that somethings were bound to be lost in translation.

Not having seen the movie yet myself, there isn’t much more -I- can say on the matter (one more week!) but here are a few sites that already have posts up about the movie. Once again though I’m quite surprised that the discussions have not been more active. If any of you bloggers are talking about this on your own sites, drop off a link in the comments here. I’d love to hear what you thought about Watchmen.

Tor.com

Suvudu

ComicMix

Nerdage

/End of Line

~ Darcy

Let the countdown resume.

Warner Brothers and Fox have finally agreed to terms in the Watchmen legal dispute, thank the light.  

Under the agreement Fox will not be co-distributor of the film, but they are getting a sizable payoff, 8.5% of box office profits, and reimbursement for their legal fees and the original $1.4 million dollar investment they put forth back in the 80’s for their own failed vision of Watchmen.  

The movie will release as scheduled on March 6th 2009, and we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief.

/End of Line

~ Darcy