Books like Guards! Guards!: The Graphic Novel

A couple of things before we start.I have only read four comic books (or graphic novels? I swear I don't know the difference, I am not taking the piss) before and those were sexist and pointless. I am not a comic book person, but I love illustrated editions of books. Same thing, right? Nope.And secondly, I love Terry Pratchett and will read anything with his name on it, even those terrible sci-fi books he wrote with that other dude.So, with my pathetic knowledge and experience of comicbookgraphicnovels and my superb knowledge and great experience of Terry Pratchett, let's get started.Everything that Terry is great at can't really be translated in to pictures. His stories are top notch but they're never excellent, brilliant, superbly thought-out or anything much different to what you get elsewhere. But the way he tells them is one of the most sublime things in the literary world. His words flow like silk over melting butter-or other such things that have little or no friction-and as a nice side-effect of this, the stories develop in a lovely way that has all that stuff we love in a good story, like excellent pace and all the words in the right place.What you rely on in a comicbookgraphicnovel is the dialogue. PTerry is good at dialogue, but he isn't brilliant. His characters have some wonderful one-liners and his characters' conversations definitely almost always pass the Bechdel Test, so yey. But this particular comicbookgraphicnovel didn't really have much except the wonderful one-liners, and one-liner after one-liner is just annoying. Like a comedian dying on stage who resorts to insulting the hecklers instead of observing.I did like the drawings. I thought Vimes was pretty spot on but I often found it hard to decide who was who. You have to figure that out for yourself. If I didn't know who Vimes was I probably still wouldn't know who he was having finished this. I definitely wouldn't like him (read: be madly in love with him and imagine him slightly younger and better looking in my head) after reading him in this. We get his thoughts but we just don't get his proper thoughts. Am I making any sense? I don't think I am.I just don't really get it. Really.Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest | Shop | Etsy