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A review by jenny_librarian
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures: Ultimate Collection by Stacie Ritchie, Laurell K. Hamilton
3.0
Trigger warning: graphic violence, gore
3 ⭐️
Did I just read a bad ripoff of True Blood?
It's not that the story is not interesting, it's just that there's way too much stuff going wrong to appreciate the story. This is a GRAPHIC novel. Importance on the "graphic" part. As far as graphic novels go, this was way down the scale.
1. There's too much writing. If a page has more to read than to look at, it's not a graphic novel. It's a novel with illustrations. I'm sure at least part of the writing could have been forgotten without taking anything from the story, or at least illustrated. The writing weights down the story immensely and it becomes heavy to read.
2. The illustrations in themselves aren't great. I don't know if it's the way Laurell K. Hamilton wrote her characters, but each man looks like a romance novel model and they all either have curly or short hair. And every guy has a six or eight pack. Not to mention the way everyone has a V-shape body... At least try to make realistic looking characters...
3. Is the only insult in Anita's book "son of a bitch"? She repeats it on and on again at the end, as if she couldn't think of anything more original. Which is a sharp decline, since the insults in the first part were much more imaginative...
4. The amount of side-story is overwhelming. You got Valentine, Edward, Jean-Claude, Jensen... It's a lot and it kinda mashes up together and makes too much action for a single story.
5. Anita spends the whole story being scared shitless, but it doesn't actually show. She keeps mentioning how scared she is, but nothing in the illustrations proves that she is. And then she kills Nikolaos in 2 blows. Doesn't sound much scared to me.
Basically, I was disappointed. It could have been a lot better, but it failed miserably. If it's loyal to the novels, I don't wanna read the rest.
3 ⭐️
Did I just read a bad ripoff of True Blood?
It's not that the story is not interesting, it's just that there's way too much stuff going wrong to appreciate the story. This is a GRAPHIC novel. Importance on the "graphic" part. As far as graphic novels go, this was way down the scale.
1. There's too much writing. If a page has more to read than to look at, it's not a graphic novel. It's a novel with illustrations. I'm sure at least part of the writing could have been forgotten without taking anything from the story, or at least illustrated. The writing weights down the story immensely and it becomes heavy to read.
2. The illustrations in themselves aren't great. I don't know if it's the way Laurell K. Hamilton wrote her characters, but each man looks like a romance novel model and they all either have curly or short hair. And every guy has a six or eight pack. Not to mention the way everyone has a V-shape body... At least try to make realistic looking characters...
3. Is the only insult in Anita's book "son of a bitch"? She repeats it on and on again at the end, as if she couldn't think of anything more original. Which is a sharp decline, since the insults in the first part were much more imaginative...
4. The amount of side-story is overwhelming. You got Valentine, Edward, Jean-Claude, Jensen... It's a lot and it kinda mashes up together and makes too much action for a single story.
5. Anita spends the whole story being scared shitless, but it doesn't actually show. She keeps mentioning how scared she is, but nothing in the illustrations proves that she is. And then she kills Nikolaos in 2 blows. Doesn't sound much scared to me.
Basically, I was disappointed. It could have been a lot better, but it failed miserably. If it's loyal to the novels, I don't wanna read the rest.