Full colour. Really excited to find a graphic novel representation of this famous poem, even if it transpired to be stills from an animation. The artist worked with Ginsberg himself, and so this made the poem come to life in an authentic way. So much can be interpreted from the lines, essentially a person in love, in anguish, in society, acknowledging artists, intellectuals, and activists. ( )

I'll have to expose myself as a half wit perhaps, but I struggled with this. Howl has been on my list to read for a long time. This graphic illustration was a wonderful accompaniment to the text. There are some wonderful turns of phrase, but I had trouble understanding the whole. Much of it seemed like an inside joke and I was on the outside. Maybe a better understanding of the time and people mentioned would clarify. ( )

When I first encountered "Howl" in high school, I couldn't appreciate all of the poem's references and meanings. I'm glad I revisited it because now I feel it more deeply, through life experience. However, I was not terribly impressed by the artwork that represented the poem in this graphic adaptation. The 3D renderings lacked feeling and emotion; the creature representing Moloch felt more like a video game antagonist; it just didn't capture it for me. I think some of the images were stills from the film and that could explain why it was lacking for me.

That said, I read the introduction and the artist worked with Ginsberg...so perhaps I wasn't in the right headspace. It definitely put me in the mood to read more Ginsberg, though. ( )

I read the poem as a teenager, and I've gradually been getting more interested in graphic novels, so when I saw a graphic novel version--with Ginsberg's involvement, so I knew it wouldn't be a horrible hack job--in Powell's recently I couldn't resist.

The poem is just as viciously powerful as when I first read it; though I can only imagine it would have had more impact when it was published, in 1956. The only detail that marks it as in any way dated is the repeated references to typewriters. The significance of the age is more that it shows the disaffection and societal failure it recounts as not only not being novel--I knew that, though it's good to be reminded--but even older than I had realised. The boomer generation has somehow managed to spin this fable of rebellion having been invented in the mid-late 60s, whereas here is a long poem from 10 years earlier that oozes vitriol at the establishment and recounts insistently all the "collateral damage" of an epoch that these days seems to get romanticised as being before everything got so damn complicated.

For me, apparently unlike for most of the reviewers on Goodreads, the illustrations added quite a lot. They're beautiful in themselves, the style feels very appropriate, and they fit both the individual images and the cacophonic succession of images very well. They also add something else unexpected: by letting the book put each breath of the text on a new page, they make the poem fit the print format much better than in the text-only edition I had read before, letting it flow more naturally than it can all squashed onto one page. ( )

The text itself, well, many of us know the poem already...even if we can't fully decipher it. This is maybe my third or fourth reading of Howl. This time, though, it was even more different of a reading. I picked up this graphic novel version to see what an illustrated reading would bring to the poem. I was a little disappointed. While a direct word-to-picture adaptation would be nearly impossible (and possibly ruin the integrity of the poem for some readers), I felt the illustrations didn't do much to enhance the experience. Part of it may have been the style. But another part was simply that it didn't seem to bring out any of what I got out of the poem. Again, this will vary from reader to reader, so I can't hold it against the book too completely. I was just expecting something different and more fulfilling. A positive thing that came out of this reading, though, is since the text was displayed on the page differently than a text-only version of the poem, I was able to focus more on each line and image (from the text, not the physical image) in a way that I hadn't before when it was just line-after-line and stanza-after-stanza in a book. ( )