Hey all, Sam here.
Fan Expo Cleveland is wrapping up now, and overall, I think it has been a pretty productive weekend. Oh, and I am pleased to announce that our cat Luna has returned home. She took shelter on our porch Friday night because it was starting to rain heavily, and a friend went by the house to check if she was there. Luna, being her usual self, decided that yelling at our friend was the proper method of getting her attention, and our friend was able to open the door and chase Diablo away from the door before coaxing Luna inside.
It definitely was a relief to get a video call where we could see her running away inside the house. The whole time she was gone I was pretty much an emotional wreck, and it definitely had an effect on me going about my daily business.
Because of all that, I had to rearrange my blog schedule a little bit. I had originally planned to write up another book review for today…but the words weren’t coming out the way I wanted them to, and I’d like to put out a decent quality post, so I chose to write up this post instead. I will say that there are a few posts I had originally planned to write and post over the past week, and I revised the whole schedule…so I might throw up a couple bonus posts in the next week or so in order to catch up for my review goals.
Anyway, let’s go ahead and jump into the review…which I guess technically qualifies as a Middle Grade March review.
Sometimes weird things happen to people. Ask Jake. He could tell you about the night he and his friends saw a strange light in the sky that seemed to be heading right for them. That was the night five normal kids learned that humanity is under a silent attack . . . and were given the power to fight back!
Now Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias, and Marco can transform into some of the most dangerous creatures on Earth. And they must use that power to outsmart an evil greater than anything the world has ever seen. . . .
The wildly popular, bestselling books return, now as a graphic novel series, adapted by Chris Grine.
My Thoughts
Rating: 5 stars
Y’all, this took me back to 1996…which is when the series first came out. The last time I read the book was in 2020 and I gave it 3.5 stars, but 5 stars for nostalgia feels. This graphic novel adaptation of it…yeah, it was just fun, and it was a faithful adaptation that kept me turning the pages, so I’m just going to go ahead and give it the 5 stars it deserves.
The way some people have talked and felt about series like Twilight or the Mortal Instruments or Hunger Games (or the series that shall no longer be named), that’s how I feel about Animorphs. I obsessed over these books. They made such an impact on my childhood. I use to play make believe with friends on the playground in elementary school and we would pretend we were the Animorphs. I wrote self-insert fanfic where I was also there with the others and also got morphing powers. I would fight my brother for control of the remote so I could watch the Animorphs TV show. I begged my parents to buy each book as soon as it came out.
I still own all of my Animorphs books. So…finding out that there was a new graphic novel adaptation…well, I had to check it out.
I think it is a pretty great and pretty faithful adaptation. It’s very true to what I remember, and the art definitely helped with visualizing that these characters are still young, because they are still pretty young. And, oh my gosh, the panels that show the morphing process…wow, were those fantastic and a bit gross. But hey, morphing never sounded like it was pleasant to watch.
There’s a lot to this book, with introducing our main group of characters: Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Marco, and with introducing the Andalites, the Yeerks, the Hork Bajir and the Taxxon, and the whole invasion that makes up the conflict for the series.
But I thought the art and the colors made the story very approachable and I didn’t want to put this down. I read it in one sitting, and had a great time doing it. From what I remember the main plot and dialogue of this first book in the series was adapted very nicely and accurately.
I sincerely hope they continue with these graphic novels. I’d love to expand my Animorph collection to be two complete sets, the original novels and the graphic novel versions. That would be amazing.
Well, that is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
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