Graphic Novel Friday Rick Riordan/Robert Venditti Percy Jackson & The Olympians The Lightning Thief

[Giovanni Gelati]

Long title, I know, sorry. Have you seen the movie? Read the novel series? Read this graphic novel? I have done two out three, the movie and the graphic novel. They are not the same, but the spirit of the character and
some of the circumstances are similar. Here is the inside of the jacket to the
graphic novel to explain a bit better: “The first books in the blockbuster
best-selling series like you have never seen it before. Mythological monsters
and gods of the Mount Olympus seem to be walking out of the pages of twelve year
old Percy Jackson’s textbooks and into his life. And worse, he’s angered a few
of them. Zeus’s master lightning bolt has been stolen, and Percy is the Prime
suspect. Now, he and his friends have just ten days to find and return Zeus’s
stolen property and bring peace to a warring Mount Olympus.”

Sounds like serious stuff. I had the good fortune of sharing this with my eleven year old daughter who accompanied me to the movie of the same name. Our thoughts were pretty much the same on both projects. The graphic
novel was a very good rendering of the story and added a few new elements to
it. Seeing it in a different way, told in a different manner, kept it fresh for
me and intrigued me a bit. The differences raised many questions for me in the
manner in which the characters were drawn. Why? Who determined the changes and
what was the genesis of them? It seems to me that the trends in today’s graphic
novels is to pen and ink the characters as closely to the actor as possible to
use as an extension of that, to build upon that and use it as a synergy to
bridge the gap in time between vehicles. In Venditti’s graphic novel we have
breaks that are nice, but I was a bit perplexed as to why he strayed from the
story with such large gaps in plotline.

Having said that, this is a very nice graphic novel. I was happy to have been able to share this and my thoughts of it with my daughter, that doesn’t get to happen too much anymore. The artwork was nice, the dialogue
and the feeling it imparted were very good, and the overall project works.
Hopefully they continue to produce the graphic novels for the series. It is
nice to see a character and a series brought forth in all three dimensions:
novel, graphic novel and movie.

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