Revisit: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel

There was a lot of hype around Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when it was first released. And I was curious about it but didn't want to read it because I had read Pride and Prejudice once and hadn't found it to be anything special. I mean, there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it, and I read it from beginning to end, but I didn't find anything charming about it or really anything that would make me call it a good book. In fact, while we're at it:

I feel bad giving it such a low rating because I have a friend who loves Jane Austen, and I'm just so "meh" about it. But, the world would be a pretty dull place if we all liked the same things, right?

So, anyway, I hadn't enjoyed the original and I wasn't convinced the presence of zombies would make it any better. So I didn't pick up the novel. But then, I heard there was a graphic novel. Awesome, I could read the story in less pages! And if I hated it, I wouldn't feel like I had wasted hours of my life. Turns out, that was a pretty good call.

I'm now certain I would have never made it through the book. The premise is that zombies have taken over the world (they are rather common), but the world continues on as ever. Elizabeth and her sisters have been trained as ninjas in the art of killing zombies, and they are very good at it. But, even with that spin. The story is still very much Pride and Prejudice, just with a different flair. And, in the end, I didn't find it made that much of a difference at all in my perception of the novel.

Aside from the story itself, I do want to gripe about the artwork (which is not considered in the overall effect of the story). Most of the women are hardly distinguishable from one another, and I absolutely hate it when a graphic novel does this. What is the point of illustrating the characters if the reader can't tell them apart? (Sadly, the Firefly comics fall to this same issue.) Jane and Elizabeth are only distinguishable by hair color. The same can be said for Bingley and Darcy. Mrs. Bennet also changes in age from frame to frame, which is extremely annoying. The zombies are drawn in wonderful detail, and I don't understand why the same effort wasn't put into illustrating the main characters.

This is just "meh" all around.