Body Work and Night Witch by Ben Aaronovich et al

[lightreads]

Body Work and Night Witch

3/5. *trumpets* The first graphic novels to appear on this here reading blog! These are the first two completed interstitial graphic stories set between the Rivers of London books, as read to me alternately by axiom_of_stripe and gnomad. They were pretty easy to read out loud, for the curious, given that they are dialogue-heavy and drawn in what was described to me as photorealistic style. So the panels are what they are showing, and not a lot else. Good for trying to be mainstream, I guess, though I do wish from an artistic point of view they'd made other choices, like giving the Nightingale point-of-view sections a different style.

Things that please me: Nightingale wanders around having one-sided conversations with the dog, bless; Molly is a scary motherfucker; we get more insight into the way Nightingale thinks through problems (for better or worse, lol, use your phone, child); we get roughly equal quantities of Peter nudity with lady nudity.

So I liked these, but I continue to be vaguely annoyed that they are included by reference in the books now. IDK, something about that bugs me, and I can't figure out whether I'm being ridiculous about it. I think it's that I kinda feel about different kinds of media the way some people feel about the food on their plate: they are different things and they should not touch!

Something we didn't know going in – the single issue comics have extra material included, like interviews and historical background, that were inexplicably left out of the printed trade paperbacks.

Comments

[cyprinella]

I was also annoyed by the multiple comic story references in Hanging Tree. Yeah they were mostly just asides but still annoying. I should break down and get them now that they're in trade but I was eh about the art I saw.

[jesse_the_k]

Single-issue comics almost always have extra material in them, as an incentive for folks who read them serially as they come out. (It's generally more expensive when one reads in single issues, so the publishers find any hook they can.)

In particular, most single-issue comics have letters columns--obviously more important pre-net. Kelly Sue deConnick's amazing Bitch Planet, for example, has brief essays from a wide range of feminists in each single issue, but they're not in the TBPs (2nd one debuts mid-March)
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/bitch-planet