Steven Brust's Jhereg - The Graphic Novel

Vlad Taltos

by Alan Zelenetz

comic adaption of a great fantasy book

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh god, it's bad. It's so bad. And yet it's still a graphic novelization of Jhereg and therefore I still love it. That three-star rating is a compromise on a deep need to give this both five stars and one.

Fans of the original book will understand everything they need to know when I say that Morrolan has a beard. And yet it has some beautiful touches, such as Aliera in a long dress floating off the ground and the spell calling Rocza to him.....

[Frank Vasquez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to track down a physical copy, but totally worth it!
Story: brief, but faithful, and definitely captures the fun-cool-methodical fantasy-pulp tone of the original novel.
Art: simple yet fun, slick and striking, maybe not how you’d picture these characters but it’s lively and surprisingly colorful in its way!
Overall: not gonna wow you if you’ve read the books, maybe would make you want to read them if you never have, this graphic novel was fun and did excellent keeping the major plot and story elements as well as the humor and presence of the secondary characters.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a comic adaption of a great fantasy book, this was pretty good...though the art didn't capture my image of the characters.

[StrictlySequential · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is one of those that annoy me- however well it's executed is simply making up for the limitless license of the author to add whatever magic is necessary to drive the plot. Stories need boundaries or else the conflict has no gravity and all that supernatural surprise is droll to me.

The art is tremendous- other than poorly moving anatomy here and there.

[Bryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was frankly pretty bad; I would love to see a good graphic novel adaptation of Brust's work, but this is absolutely not it. All the things that are interesting about Brust's world are subtracted out to leave a sort of generic fantasy, probably because it was 1990 and that is who they thought the audience for comics was, but ugh.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

As other reviewers have said, it's not great. Clearly trying to introduce concepts and ideas from the series using character dialogue much too quickly for a >50 page comic book. I'm glad I read it, just for completion, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. (It also took a long distance interlibrary loan to even get a copy, so it wasn't as easy as I'd hope for such a small payoff.)

[Jamie Connolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it. But I think it would not be so great of a read had I not read the books first. Comic doesn't give enough info to make the story very compelling. Probably not easy to understand either without reading the book first. But I read a few of them so I liked it. 4 stars.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted it to be good, but it rushed through an outline of the original without capturing much of the charm of Steven Brust’s story or characters.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this because of my love for the Vlad Taltos series, but I can't. It's like that weird uncle everyone keeps an eye on; sure it's part of the family, but you kinda wish it weren't. The graphics are questionable and the compression of the story just doesn't work. It needed to be longer for it to make any sense at all for readers who hadn't read the source material.