Haven't I seen you somewhere else?

I read the comic version of "Beautiful Creatures" this week.

I'm not the sort of person who tends to believe one version of a story is ever inherently better than another based on medium. It's all in execution, and two media can handle the same story in very different ways and have both be great stories in their own right in very different ways. As always, there may be spoilers behind the cut.




But sometimes you read something, or watch it or whatever, and you can just tell the medium you're viewing it in was just not the right one for the way they're trying to tell the story.

I always feel a little guilty about not liking that, and even more guilty when I give it a mixed to negative review on Goodreads. I guess such a review doesn't really say the story or idea are bad, but I sometimes worry that seeing a bad review of, say, the novel version of something will make people less interested in also trying something else, like a movie or comic version.

I think I may have to try the next volume of that series Beautiful Creatures is in in novel format. It seemed like a good enough idea, but the comic was on overdrive.

It's not the only comic adaptation I've read of a book. I think the first ones would probably be the Dark Tower comics. I don't have all of them, but I've enjoyed all that I've read. I think part of it is the incredible art by Jae Lee that jsut evokes the feel of especially the first book in the series. I always find his work vaguely unsettling yet beautiful.

I think the Dark Tower comic books benefited from being stretched out over many, many books and being given the space they needed to really tell a story. This is probably where Beautiful Creatures fell apart for me.

One I read that I can't compare to its novels because I liked them enough that I never felt the need to check out the books was the Cirque du Freak books. That series fell apart toward the end, I think just because it was trying to wrap up a lot and got away a little from the relate-able concerns of Darren. But overall, I never felt like the story either dragged or rushed and it really drew me in at first - found it terribly compelling.