Crime and Punishment is one of my favorite books of all time, language rich, full of internal monologue and angst and despair. I am not sure what you get from this 120 page graphic adaptation of a more than 600 page epic story. This pares the story down to bare bones, but without poetry. It feels a little insulting, the very worst thing you can do to a classic, to dumb it down in the way elites have always feared comics adaptations would do to great works! If you are going to do a short adaptation of a long work, do something unique with it, adapt it in an altogether new way!
Okay, Mairowitz says he is "modernizing" it by setting it in the late twentieth century, or is this century. How do we know this? We see a Sex Pistols poster, and a "Scream" print. What other evidence is there for it's being modernized?! What purpose would it serve to modernize it, were it actually modernized? We get no clear answers from the text.
I love this story, I mean the plot, which we do get a minimal sense of from this text, but I don't think it gets us interested in reading it if we haven't already read it, I am guessing. It just looks like a cat and mouse murder story, nothing unique about it. But I'll say, I give it two stars: one half star just because of the story, as truncated as it is, because it reminded me of the actual novel and it's nice to be reminded of its greatness, and another one and a half stars just because I liked the artwork quite a bit, and found it sometimes an interesting visualization of the characters. A talented artist shapes this story.
But overall, it's a disappointment. Hitchcock said the ideal text length to adapt to a full length movie is a short story. To take a 600 page novel of remarkable complexity and depth and make it into a 120 page comic without doing anything unique to it artistically is an insult to Dostoevsky, to novelists, and to comics. So there.