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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
When I might have been reading as a young child, I was watching movies instead. When I finally started reading in my teens, instead of literature aimed at my age group, including Comic Books of all stripes, I dove straight into literature with a capital "L". My first books were THE GRAPES OF WRATH, CATCH 22, and THE HUMAN FACTOR by Graham Greene and I never looked back. In the past couple years though I have discovered the Graphic Novels or Comics that I did not read back in the day. Now WATCHMEN and MAUS are among my favorite books. My relative lack of knowledge led me to read a book cover to cover that I might have otherwise just dipped into from time to time like a reference book: 500 ESSENTIAL GRAPHIC NOVELS. This is a marvelously valuable reference sturdily bound for constant access and book marking--even wedging your foot between pages. Organized by genre, the best of the best is displayed page after page with each book's cover usually a half page tall and often there are brief samples of the work displayed as well. Each has a synopsis and review rating--for quality and age appropriateness. There are indexes to allow searches by titles, artists, writers and publishers. While these are nifty, they aren't perfect. I did notice a few omissions while referencing back and forth. Another odd thing is that the reviews don't always seem to match the star rating given to a particular work. Don't know if these were done independent of each other but it occasionally seemed that way. Each genre subheading has a nice introduction but something I missed was a more comprehensive piece talking about the best graphic novels over all. I may be addicted to lists, but I would have liked a top ten of each genre and then one overall. Sometimes also it was not clear when the original publication date of the work was when they are rating a recent reprint or new collection of older works. But these small quibbles aside, quite the invaluable reference book for someone who knew virtually nothing before I started reading it and I imagine it would hold more than a few surprises for even more hardcore readers.
A great resource for anyone who wants to devour or even just delve into graphic novels. I felt the author tended to be a little overly positive in his reviewing, but overall the book accomplishes what it set out to do and in an organized fashion.