I will confess that I've always bounced off Terry Prachett's work. Disc World, you name it, I can't read more than a few pages before I'm tired of it. Good Omens (the novel) was no exception. But a year or so ago Bowen and Boen got into watching the TV show, and I found that I enjoyed it. I guess I liked the plot, it was always Terry Prachett's writing that left me cold.
Colleen Doran announced that she was doing a graphic novel adaptation of Good Omens. It was a kickstarter project, and I backed it before the allegations about Neil Gaiman was announced. In any case, it wouldn't have felt fair to knock Colleen Doran for associating with Gaiman. The graphic novel took a year or so to deliver, and I'd even forgotten about it by the time it showed up in the mail.
It's a testament to how far Gaiman's star has fallen that his name wasn't even on the title page to the book, though it showed up in the interior splash page. The art is great, as you can expect from Doran, but you can tell that the comic was adapted from a (very wordy) novel. There are several places where a traditional comic book author would tell the story in pictures rather than huge blocks of text that were probably lifted from the novel proper.
Where the comic differs from the TV show, it was clear that the show was the one that deviated from the novel. The novel does the usual Gaiman schtick of setting up for a great battle and then having it be defused with an anticlimax (the TV show doesn't shy away from that schtick). The graphic novel adds enough color (literally) and distraction that the Terry Prachett prose didn't bother me at all.
What can I say? A comic book that lets me read a novel that I've bounced off. That makes it recommended.
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