A Game of Thrones, Volume 1: The Graphic Novel [Hardcover]

A question for those of you who've read "A Game of Thrones" in novel form: when you imagined all the characters in their grubby, dark-ages glory, did you imagine Disney-style cartoony faces with big, shiny manga-eyes and glossy digital colour? If so, I think this book will make you very happy as it's a very good adaptation of the source material in terms of story and dialogue and the artwork certainly has that "1990s Marvel comics" feel, with exaggerated, angular, cartoony characters, coloured in shiny digital separations.

It doesn't work for me though.

The artwork for such a dark, bloody story of double crossing and court intrigue needs to be grubby and realistic. There are plenty of illustrators out there who can do a realist style and would have suited the story much more strongly.

I think the illustrator was badly chosen for this book and this is a major problem for a graphic adaptation.

I suspect it's always tricky when looking at a second adaptation of a work and trying not to compare it to the other adapation. It is a question that should it be judged on it's own merits or should it be compared to the TV series. Either way be it purely compared to the book or alongside the TV series the comic adapation falls slightly short of the mark and doesn't live up to the books as well as the TV series does.

However it's still A Song of Ice & Fire so it's still a good read and it does a good job of adapting prose into a comic format.

The comic does attempt to do it's own thing seperate from the series as they have attempted to make sure the characters bare little resemblance to the actors playing them in the TV series. As mentioned in another review think of Marvel during the nineties and you probably aren't far off the mark. While it is hard to not think of the cast of the series when looking at the comic art for the most part the designs work quite well a few are slightly questionable. The covers are also good and the Alex Ross cover is probably the best cover done for the series. Although the Ross cover fails to convey anything about the series.

Unlike the TV series the Stark children are returned to their ages from the book. Their designs for the most part are quite good although Arya and Bran look older than they should. Catelyn on the other hand looks younger than her character should do.

There are however some some rather odder choices made in the adapation The comic book adapation is overseen by the editors of the books themselves so that makes some of the choices very odd indeed. The first is the intial meeting between Jon Snow & Tyrion as the acrobatic leap Tyrion makes is kept intact, which in itself is an odd choice as Mr Martin himself decided this was not the direction he intended with the character and notably Tyrion doesn't do anything similar in the books.

The other is the conversation between Robert & Ned regarding Lyanna adds implications that were not there in the original scene in the book.

The strangest choice especially as the people behind this book our the actual editors of the book series as well is that of the language. While it matches the dialogue from the books in places the odd choice is that any of the swearing is dropped. Strange, when the comic still features violence and sex yet drops all bad language as A Song of Ice & Fire is dark fantasy aimed at adults.

One final point you should roughly be paying around £15-20 for a hardcover copy of this trade. £45 is twice the price you should be picking this up for in a comic book shop or book shop.

As a huge fan of anything Game of Thrones I was excited to read this! Unfortunately I have to give it only 3 stars as their are numerous spelling mistakes! Price Joffrey instead of Prince for example!

I did not expect this in a professionally published Graphic Novel! Especially considering the amount of text is minimal compared to the novel!

All in all, a great adaptation, but disappointed and publishing was rushed and not edited probably! Far to many silly spelling/grammar mistakes!