Jack London was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing.
Years ago, Classic Comics, heavily digested versions of classic novels, functioned as illustrated Cliff's Notes for students. Kleid (Ninety Candles, Brownsville) and Nino (Graphic Classics: The Invisible Man) have updated the old form with this adaptation of Jack London's perennial. Kleid's adaptation competently summarizes the original, introducing the reader to Buck the dog, the vile man in the red sweater and the sympathetic John Thornton, highlighting the main events from the novel and using London's most workmanlike sentences to keep the story moving along. Nino's black-and-white art has a nice kinetic, almost impressionistic quality. Unfortunately, his emphasis on movement over clarity makes it difficult to tell human beings from each other, let alone dogs, and obscures any real emotion. Kleid himself sums up the biggest problem with this adaptation in his afterword: "London was smart-he went the novel route, where it's easier to get inside a dog's head." The audience for this adaptation is blurred: older readers may just read the original, while younger readers are unlikely to understand either the art or Kleid's self-indulgent afterword, which tries to compare the adaptation to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's groundbreaking (but arguably unsuitable for children) We3. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Actor Jeff Daniels expertly brings to life Jack London's classic story of survival in the Yukon Territory's harsh landscape. He reads the tale with compassion and empathy for Buck's plight, giving a pitch-perfect performance. Characters are voiced with believable accents, and music and the sounds of the wild enhance the telling. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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