The Hound of the Baskervilles
(my review on Amazon.com, all my reviews)
A Sherlock Holmes classic is brought to life in comic form. Despite the rich graphics and illustrations, poor editing and less than stellar drawings make it only an average result.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most popular of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's long stories. A murder mystery, a love story, a tale of revenge, of an inheritance and its pursuit, of supernatural angles, and more. There was even a commercially successful Hindi movie "inspired" from the novel, Bees Saal Baad
.This graphic comic is a let down. For several reasons.
Firstly, the story telling is disjointed. It just does not flow smoothly. Converting a novel into a comic form is not as easy as it may sound, and this comic fails to tell the story in a manner that you can understand it easily.
Secondly, some of the drawings are a bit clunky, to use the word. Especially when depicting action scenes, the persons drawn do not seem very realistic or accurate...
It appears that several of the key persons behind this series are Indians. They surely would have grown up reading the ever popular Amar Chitra Katha series of comics. Converting novels, stories, and adventures into a seamless and very good comic narrative is something the people at Amar Chitra Katha were able to do, with a remarkable degree of success. There are valuable lessons to be learned from that series.
At the end of it all, this is not a comic or perhaps a series I would recommend to children to get acquainted with classics. A pity. The intent seems genuine, and the effort seems considerable. The end result however disappoints.
- Campfire India - Graphic novels
- The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Buy The Hound Of The Baskervilles from Flipkart.com
© 2010, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.
