Moby Dick

January 1, 2003
Comic book aficionados will appreciate master Will Eisner's latest adaptation, Moby Dick. It may not begin, "Call me Ishmael," but the story otherwise remains true to Herman Melville's classic, with Queequeg, Ahab and the great white whale all making their entrances on cue. The cartoon panels that chronicle the final showdown between the captain and the giant fish are particularly spectacular.

June 1, 2010

In this slender graphic adaptation of Melville's magnum opus, Ishmael, Queequeg and the rest of the uniformly burly, steely-eyed whalers are strong presences in Singh's art—at least until their pale, gargantuan nemesis shows up to scatter them and their ship as flotsam across the waves. Ahab, craggy features slashed by a broad scar, is properly oracular, too: "Toward you I roll, you all-destroying but unconquering whale. From hell's heart I stab at you." You can practically hear Gregory Peck's voice. The small but clear lettering in dialogue balloons and infrequent captions is easy to read, much of the language echoes that of the original and, if the plot is reduced to a bare sketch, the art, at least, punches up the tale's melodrama and psychological tensions. Though an also-ran next to the versions of comics legends Will Eisner (2001) and Bill Sienkiewicz (1990), it's absorbing enough—and the biographical introduction and closing pages on whaling ships and sperm whales provide a nice veneer of historical context. (Graphic fiction. 11-13)

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2010
Grades 7-10 Can you pitch a harpoon down a live whales throat and then jump in after it? Ishmael is asked upon a request to join the crew of the whaling ship Pequod. The dark pit that Ishmael hurls himself into is not Moby Dick, as readers of Melvilles classic know, but rather the fixation of Captain Ahab, who is driven to find the whale that took his leg and with it the rest of his life. As the question put to Ishmael masks an unexpected answer, so does literatures greatest maritime adventure mask a story that is mainly a character study about a man willing to destroy himself and his crew in pursuit of his obsession. One of Campfires new line of classic adaptations, this graphic novel unobtrusively modernizes wording and renders visuals with a gorgeous, painterly care as it presents what is essentially a static tale of narration and dialogue (save the climactic battle) that will take many first-time readers expecting a more dynamic story quite by surprise with its penchant for psychological insight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)