Available for the first time in softcover! Join Alice on her whimsical journey down the rabbit hole. For the first time ever, Lewis Carroll's beloved masterpiece is faithfully adapted and illustrated in its entirety, including the long-lost chapter, "The Wasp in a Wig!" From her initial meeting with the White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to her final dinner party with the entire (and outrageous) Through the Looking Glass cast, every moment of Alice's adventures in that astonishing landscape is captured in gorgeous detail. With old favorites like the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter joined now by a long-forgotten Carroll creation, The Wasp, in one of the book's latter chapters, children and adults alike can rediscover the complete Alice tale and fall in love with Wonderland all over again!
LEAH MOORE is an author born in Northampton, England in 1978.
Leah's comic writing career began in 2002 with stories for America's Best Comics. Most recently her solo comics scripting has appeared as part of Dynamite Entertainment's Gail Simone masterminded crossover series Swords of Sorrow (2015, with Francesco Manna).
In 2006 Leah wrote the story and copy to accompany The Royal Mail's 40th anniversary Christmas Stamps. She has written columns and articles for The Big Issue, Lifetime TV online, and Comic Heroes Magazine.
In 2013 Leah was the Project Manager of digital comics reading platform Electricomics. She was also the contributing editor of Electricomics flagship release, co-writing the sci-fi story Sway, with art by Nicola Scott.
Leah and her husband, John Reppion, have been scripting comics together since 2003, writing for the likes of 2000 AD, Channel 4 Education, Dark Horse, DC Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Electricomics, IDW, and Self Made Hero.
They have written established characters such as Doctor Who (The Whispering Gallery, 2008 with Ben Templesmith) and Sherlock Holmes (The Trial of Sherlock Holmes, 2009 with Aaron Campbell, and The Liverpool Demon, 2012 with Matt Triano), as well as creating their own including Brit-Cit Psi Division, Judge Lillian Storm (Storm Warning, 2015 with Tom Foster).
Together they have faithfully adapted notable works by Lewis Carroll (The Complete Alice, 2010), H. P. Lovecraft (The Shadow Over Innsmouth, 2012), Bram Stoker (The Complete Dracula, 2009), and M. R. James (Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Vol 1, and 2) into comics and graphic novels.
Most recently she wrote an adaptation of The Doors Morrison Hotel album , and Motley Crue, The Dirt Declassified, for Z2 comics, as well as stories for their Joan Jett Anthology and the Tori Amos Little Earthquakes Anthology. She is currently working on The Tarot Circle for Liminal 11, as well as several other books yet to be announced.
Alice in Wonderland is one of the first books i ever read and it's hard complete understand the story and this book is like a digest version for young people, some of the parts was omited even when the story itself is exactly the same that Carroll created. The good part is that this one reads so fast, i mean this also include Alice Through The Looking Glass and you can finish this graphic novel in less that 2 hours, and you have everything that is important about the story but you doesn't have some things that let you thinking as the original version does.
At the good side i must admit that the pictures are so good, the essence of the original illustrations is there but the feel that transmit is really different, a little less childish
A digital copy of this book was provided by NetGalley
Thanks to NetGalley that sent me a copy of this graphic novel in exchange for a review!
This graphic novel version of Alice in Wonderland was really beautiful. The art was simple and really good looking, and I think the colours are just perfect for this kind of story. Every single illustration really portrayed the soul of the novel, and it felt almost like watching the old Disney version of it. It was a speed read and a nice occasion to re-read one of my favorite classical children books and it managed to put in images and drawings the words and the spirit of Lewis Carroll. 5 stars well deserved!
Fans of Lewis Carrol's Wonderland will rejoice to see a dark, slightly insidious presentation in full colour. Wonderland has always been a dark story white washed down into something cutesy for mass consumption. In this graphic novel, it stays true to how Mr. Carrol meant it to be. The drawings are very well done. I like the panel layouts and how it flows so well from one scene to the next. The wacky stories are so well depicted by artist Erica Awano. I especially liked the explanation of the lost story - The Wasp in the Wig. The story was odd to say the least, but fitting with the rest of the quirky adventures. Impressive how well she brought that story to life with her imagination.
The attention to detail in each cell is fabulous. I also enjoyed the colour scheme used. It gave it a sort of vintage look. Vibrancy of the colours also made certain stories pop out for me. This collection is a work of art. Recommended for Wonderland fans.
[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]
An appropriate adaptation of Lewis Carroll's “Alice in Wonderlan” and “Through the Looking-Glass”. An adaptation, not a retelling: it follows Carroll's works faithfully, and offers a good approach to the original text (complete with its poems and rhymes—it includes “A Wasp in a Wig”, too, which at the time was dropped at Tenniel's request).
I really liked the artwork here. At first, I was expecting something a little more colorful, but after a few pages I realised the slightly muted colours worked pretty well. The drawing style has an anime-like edge when it comes to human faces; as for the Wonderland creatures and animals, their interpretation is vivid enough, and overall the atmosphere has a whimsical je-ne-sais-quoi that totally fits with Wonderland. It is “expected Alice” (blond girl, blue dress, white stockings...) yet at the same time it has its own flavour. The artist brought a lot of details into her illustrations and panels, and more than once I found myself perusing those, trying to find out what I had missed; this would deserve a second or even a third reading.
I'm not too sure if this book would make it easier for younger readers to get introduced to Carroll's stories, as it doesn't makes the text more simple to read; on the other hand, it's definitely not “dumbed down”, which wouldn't be very interesting for me, and I think it can provide a good introduction in this way.
I've never been a fan of Alice in Wonderland for the reason that Carroll was probably on crack when he wrote it. The whole thing is such a mess, really. Moore's comic adaptation is nice and very fitting, really. The wonderland part was better than the looking glass part. The former feels like a entity as opposed to the fractal latter part. I really liked that the wig wasp story was put into the comic and the extras at the back were awesome and very interesting - classics surely need this kind of a wonderful treatment. The structure works OK, but still feels slightly detached somehow. It doesn't help that the plot is all over the place, but that's Carroll's fault and not Moore's. It's just that the comic doesn't bring anything new to the classic and feels like another adaptation that's too true to the original and thus, boring.
The art is cute and very similar to Tenniel, which is actually a bummer. I don't know why everyone does the art like in the original - it seems to happen just with this book. The colors are a bit too dark and the resolution of the art looks off. The speech bubbles don't fit with the art and they stand out too much. The font isn't the best possible either. The panels are mostly quite stuffed, which makes the comic heavy. I'm not really a fan of the coloring, since it looks smudgy and all over the place - the colors are of weird hues and look tainted. The comic is like a dark swamp. It's not bad per se, but slow, hard to approach and at the same time most of it is the fault of the original work.
No se compara en nada con la película de Tim Burton... pero así suele ser, ¿no? Pero es Alicia y todos hemos querido ser Alicia por una noche, en nuestros sueños.
'Complete Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll, adapted by Leah Moore & John Reppion with art by Erica Awano is an ambitious graphic novel which works in spite of the challenges of the source.
The problem is that the first book, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,' is more narrative in nature, in spite of the loopy story. Young Alice chanses a White Rabbit down a hole. She meets a series of strange creatures and shrinks and grows and shrinks. She has a weird encounter with loyalty and makes it home intact and perhaps wiser for her journey. It is the better known book of the two, and has been adapted many times.
The second book, 'Through The Looking Glass,' is a bit more free-form in nature. Alice finds a strange world by following her cat through a mirror. She still meets really unusual characters, but the interactions consist more of long poems. There is some of this in the first book, but they are much longer here. That doesn't mean they aren't good, just that it's more poetry than prose. So it's still Alice, but the character journey is different.
The adaptation is quite good. This could be used by a scheming student to write a fairly convincing book report on the two books. The language rings true to the book and the illustrations are marvelous. The artist has not necessarily tried to copy a previous version we've seen of Alice, and yet, she was still familiar to me.
I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Dynamite Entertainment, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
I just read this off of NetGalley. I haven't read any of Alice's adventures and only have the movies as background information prior to reading this. I really liked reading this story in graphic novel format! I personally am not the biggest fan of how the original stories were written and I liked this condensed format so it wasn't as wordy. I also like all of the adventures it encompassed and I liked that I was able to note similarities and differences between this and the 3 versions of movies I've seen. Overall, I just wish that the graphics were brighter. I liked the style of the graphics but they seemed washed out which I think was the intended effect because it looks aged as if the story has been around for a long time (which it technically has). I just personally prefer brighter, more eye-catching graphics.
Overall rating is 3/5 stars. I enjoyed it and would continue to read more graphic novels from this author if given the opportunity!
Edit Sept 2016: after reflecting back on the books I've read since reading this book and how I went about rating them, I am downgrading my rating to 2 stars
Primero que nada en realidad no tenía muchas ganas de leer este libro, no se me antojaba mucho en su momento. Pero debo admitir que si tenía expectativas de el, tenía esta idea de encontrar mil metáforas de la vida y, no sé sentirme diferente al acabar de leerlo. Pero estuvo "bien", había momentos en que me hartaba, de hecho duré tanto en acabar de leerlo porque me frustraba tanto. La mejor parte del libro o la que más me gusto fue el Sombrerero Loco y la Liebre de Marzo, creo que fue la parte que me dio el empujón para acabar de leerlo. Lo dejo en un 2.5 porque fue entretenido. Muero de emoción por leer Alicia a través del espejo, que en realidad es la verdadera razón porque leí esté ya que quería tener la perspectiva completa.
Alice in Wonderland is a classic tale of a young girl daydreaming of nonsensical things and her adventures are split up between Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Of course there are some theories that Alice is not actually just daydreaming but has actually gone quite mad as the Cheshire Cat informs her everyone in Wonderland is but being a child's tale I am not sure if Lewis Carroll would really want that kind of heavy handed reality to intrude. :)
This adaptation of the story is really nice being well drawn and although the pace can be a little quick at times thanks to the comic format no longer needing us to read how things appear anymore we still get to join Alice as she discovers not only a curiouser and curiouser world but her own beliefs as she reflects upon how she got here and where her journey will lead. In fact considering how...unique Wonderland is I am always curious how each new adapter will envision the characters and world (though I know the originals do have illustrations but sometimes people have to be original) and this does not fail to meet my expectations for the bizarre whether Alice's neck grows out like a Rokurokubi after eating a bit of mushroom, having, to deal with a long winded Humpty Dumpty, or anything else in this collection as reading it reminded me fondly of the original materials. I am also going to mention that not only do they have poems from the story within the comic but each volume (there were 4) have a poem at the end of the book for those that love Lewis Carroll's word play. Volume one has "All in the Golden Afternoon", volume two has "She's All My Fancy Painted Him", volume three has "Child of the Pure Unclouded Brow", and volume 4 has "A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky." In addition the end of volume two and four has a small section called Creating Wonderland showing some samples of the creation of the comics. :)
The Complete Alice in Wonderland is a graphic novel of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The illustrations by Érica Awano are gorgeous, though I wish they were more colorful. The story looks a little dark and subdued because of it.
Some parts of the book were done brilliantly in this format, and other parts I was sad they have removed. One thing I don't understand is why my cover (since it seems it has different ones) has a teenager Alice from another illustrator. What was the thought behind that?
Anyway, I really enjoyed the book. The transition from written to graphic was done really well. The character and world designs are awesome. Honestly, one of the best adaptations to a graphic novel yet.
I received a free copy via NetGallery in exchange for an honest review.
The Complete Alice in Wonderland is a really good title for this book since it contains both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as the untold story of The Wasp in a Wig. It follows the novel’s dialogue pretty faithfully so it felt like a ‘true’ adaptation of the novel. At the same time the unique character designs and exaggerated expressions set a mood that we can’t get from just reading the novel. Unfortunately, the art felt too inconsistent and off anatomy-wise (in a not intentional way) so I was distracted half the time.
My favorite parts of this comic were the extras at the end (the poetry, the Wasp in the Wig story and background information, the process of adapting, and the interview).
The structure itself was okay, but the storytelling often felt all over the place, which made it harder to stay fully engaged. I also completely forgot just how much poetry is in Through the Looking-Glass—and while that works beautifully in the novel, here it sometimes broke up the flow of the panels.
The illustrations leaned very dark in tone, which didn’t always match the whimsical absurdity of Wonderland. On top of that, the resolution often looked low, leaving some of the art smudgy rather than sharp and immersive. It had moments of charm, but overall it didn’t quite land the way I hoped.
Grande adapação, lembra os desenhos originais do Sir John Tenniel. Mais que uma adapção, serve como material de estudo complementar para a obra, principalmente por conter o capítulo excluído "A vespa de Peruca", tanto o texto como a adaptação gráfica. Desenhos lindos e cores bem escolhidas. Vale a pena prestar atenção aos quadros, há várias referências colocadas no plano de fundo. Recomendo!
The best adaptation of Lewis Carroll's best known work...besides the Disney cartoon version. The manga style is the perfect format to capture this whimsical work chronicling one young girl's journey to a wonderous world where things rarely make any logical sense. Having read the original stories and this adaptation, you don't miss this excess fat that got trimmed.
You won't find much innovation here. This familiar graphic novel adaptation made for a fun, family-friendly read with my kids. The art was especially charming.
I have to admit that we didn't get through the poems at the end. My kids begin to protest loudly at the hint that dad might begin reading poetry to them again.
A fun graphic version of Alice in Wonderland. While the original book is fine the addition of graphics makes it much clearer. Unlike some of the movie versions the story while truncated seems true to the book. Great graphics.
This was a beautiful graphic novel but very hard to read. Graphic novels are already really choppy but the non-linearity of the story just made it impossible to follow
Another Alice? Do we need yet another Alice? Nice artwork by Awano, but nothing interpretively new. While reading this, I was wondering how Eric Shanower (Oz series) would have illustrated it?