The Explorer's Guild Jon Baird/Kevin Costner
It took me a while to get through this one; I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. Not because it's a bad story. It's a little on the shallow side though. It takes place during WWI and it's about a group of renegade army deserters who set off to find the fabled city of Shambhala for the sake of the leader's brother. Several other groups are looking for the place for different reasons and all of their paths eventually converge in the climax. There are a lot of creative, fantastical elements and adventure with an Indian Jones feel. But it didn't seem like there was one main character for the reader to identify with and the idea of the club called the Explorer's Guild is more of a red herring that just hangs in the backdrop as almost a misleading title.
What caught me by surprise though is that it's a hybrid of novel and graphic novel. Most of the narration, diary entries, etc. was written out in text while the majority of the action and dialogue was illustrated in comic story-board form. It went back and forth between the two styles frequently which made it hard for me to concentrate on it. It was interesting while I was reading it but I was in no hurry to get back to it after I'd put it down.I've never been into the comic/graphic novel scene anyway which is probably why it seemed a little empty. I'm used to being more intimately acquainted with the characters by seeing their behavior processes based on their experiences patiently and thoughtfully written out. It was kind of like reading a book and watching the movie at the same time and my brain was finding it very distracting. Anything that could be considered a curse word had the vowels deleted as a way of, I guess, making it more of a PG atmosphere. But I'm not sure what good that does when you're viewing a printed page - you'd have to be illiterate to not know the words you're looking at and I wouldn't consider it a totally YA story anyway, so I don't see the point. That's not a complaint, just one of those things that seemed odd about it.
If you like graphic novels, I think you'd like this a lot more than I did though. Like I said, there was some good creativity and storytelling going on. It's just not something I think I'll read again or pursue if more of these are made. It says "volume 1" but that could just be a part of the atmosphere.
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