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Christopher Moore's intro was the funniest part, funny enough that now I'm determined to try out one of his novels. The actual graphic novel was fine; I liked it well enough.

I really liked that intro. ( )

Got this because I thought a Christopher Moore graphic novel would be as funny as his novels. Turns out it wasn't. It was moderately entertaining, but without the need for his humorous descriptions/scene setting, it was too much joke/punch line material. And that made it not as deep or interesting and most importantly not as funny. ( )

Description: The always outrageous Christopher Moore—New York Times bestselling author of Bite Me, Lamb, You Suck, The Stupidest Angel, and a host of other prime cuts of literary hilarity—joins forces with award-winning screenwriter and director Ian Corson to bring you The Griff. An absurdly entertaining graphic novel about alien invasion—in the grand tradition of Cowboys and Aliens, but considerably more ridiculous—The Griff is vintage Chris Moore…with pictures! Get ready for thrills, chills, and a chain-smoking professional squirrel, in this high-octane tale of the infestation of Earth by extraterrestrial interlopers and the motley crew of humans who save the world…sort of.

Thoughts: I really love a lot of Christopher Moore's books. He's pretty much an instant buy author for me. For whatever reason, I never picked up [Th Griff], Moore's foray into graphic novels, when it came out in 2011.

Too bad I decided I really needed to remedy that. Thank god I found this at a second had store and only paid $11 for it. Too bad that was about $9 too many.

This is really, really bad. Not the concept, the concept is fine I think. But everything else is bad. The characters are cliche at best and or just downright stupid. There is NO character depth or development. The dialog is cheesy and surprisingly incomplete in places. Like, I had to reread sections because I thought I'd missed a speech bubble, but no, conversations just stopped mid thought.

But the WORST is the pacing. If you didn't know on an intelligent level that traveling from New York to Florida by foot, boat, and tank would take a few weeks, you could easily assume that everything in [The Griff] takes places in a single day. That's about how much character development there is so I won't blame you if you choose to just run with it. I can't stress enough how completely terrible the pacing is here. Things just HAPPEN, at random, and rarely does an action actually have a beginning, middle, and end. Here's an example, with slight spoilers but you really shouldn't read this book so don't worry about that.

The New York characters decide they need to go to Florida where they think some resistance is fighting back. One of them remembers that there is a SUBMARINE at an aquarium at the wharf. The video game developer magically knows everything about it, including operations and life support, because she toured it once. She mentions that they can travel underwater for 16 hours on battery and indefinitely on diesel on the surface. But to not get killed they have to travel underwater, the ENTIRE reason they got the damn sub. Cut to two pages later and they are making a stop in Virginia FOR DIESEL even though they've been underwater THE ENTIRE TIME.

They stop, make a joke about poptarts, see someone get snatched, and get back on the ship. Not kidding. Two pages. This is the TOTAL plot for an entire section of travel.

OHH, then they get to Charleston, SC, and magically find a hot spring in a building and take a naked soak. WTF?!?

The action from commandeering the sub in New York until the naked soak in Charleston is only 14 pages. 14 pages in which we learn exactly one thing about one character and it's stupid. That takes up 3 whole pages and it's completely useless.

The story jumps back and forth between the NY group and the FL group with no indication of the amount of time that has passed. You know time is passing for the NY group simply by the fact that they are traveling, but FL really could all be happening on the same day because none of it makes any sense. I mean, I thought there were PAGES missing from SEVERAL sections because it made so little sense. I mean, LIKE NO SENSE.

It's just all so very bad. They wrote this as a movie and then decided it would make a great graphic novel. Wrong. Maybe they should have had someone who actually writes graphic novels work with them to explain how to build a story. Because I obviously can't stress enough how bad they failed at that here. SO BAD.

A word about the art: The drawing is actually good, but it too suffers from terrible pacing and story boarding. There are actions scenes that are completely unfollowable. You know that the characters are being attacked and they are attempting to fight back, but it's mainly screaming heads and some KABLAM kind of word bubbles and then something else is happening but you still can't figure out what was going on in that scene. Dumb.

Rating: 2

Liked: 2
Plot: 2
Characterization: 2
Writing: 1
Art: 3

( )

I haven't read any Christoper Moore in a long while and I decided to give this one a shot. It was an interesting idea but I really didn't care for how it unfolded. Some of it seemed way too easy for everyone involved but of course the humans have to win in the end right? ( )