Hey all, Sam here.
Hello, and welcome back to another Manga Monday. It’s been a little while since I’ve done this regularly. I need to look at where I left off on some of my longer series reviews, so I can jump back into those (series like Black Clover, My Hero Academia, and One Piece). However, I’ve also been picking up these Manga Classics whenever I see them pop up on NetGalley, so I’ll have to see if there’s any more of them I can download and enjoy. (I did check and found Romeo & Juliet, so that’ll probably be a quick read I tackle next month.)
So, yes, thank you to UDON Entertainment, Morpheus Publishing, and NetGalley for granting me access to this book. I look forward to many more of these reads and reviews in future. As always, getting these books via NetGalley does not affect my rating or opinions at all.
Let’s get started.
Great Expectations has it all: romance, mystery, comedy, and unforgettable characters woven through a gripping rags-to-riches tale. Naive Pip, creepy Miss Haversham, beautifully cold Estella, terrifying Abel Magwitch, and the rest of Dicken’s fantastic cast are perfectly envisioned in this new adaptation in this 300-plus page volume featuring artwork by artist Nokman Poon. Manga Classics editions feature classic stories, faithfully adapted and illustrated in manga style, and available in both hardcover and softcover editions. Proudly presented by UDON Entertainment and Morpheus Publishing.
My Thoughts
Rating: 4 stars
Fun fact: though I have always been a big reader and I have a degree in Literature (so I read a lot of classics), I actually have never read Great Expectations. So honestly, that was one of the big determining factors for me picking up this Manga Classics edition. Most of the Manga Classics I’ve read and reviewed before this have been ones that I’d at least read the source material before.
I even tried looking up the movie and TV adaptations for this classic novel, and……nope, haven’t seen any of them.
So, basically I had no idea of the general plot or characters or anything of this story before going into it. And, let’s be honest, that summary tells you absolutely nothing about the content/plot of the story, except that it’s a rags-to-riches story.
I followed the story easily enough. Like with the other Manga Classics, there’s a nice blend of dialogue and exposition to tell you the things that can’t be explained visually with the fantastic manga-style art. There was a decent sized cast of characters in this story, and it felt like there was quite a bit happening, even as we had a few time skips to age Pip up from little boy to a younger adult.
I will continue to say that I’m increasingly glad for adaptations like Manga Classics or for film or mini-series adaptations of so many of these classics. With the evolution of storytelling, particularly in the last decade or so, I am increasingly aware of how absolutely dry reading most of these literary classics can be to a modern reader. Yes, there are many classics that I do still enjoy revisiting, but I think a certain amount of that is the nostalgia of it all, or because it is a shorter classic. A lot of Jane Austen is only a couple hundred pages long, whereas the original Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is over 500 pages, which is pretty long. Even more so when you consider that the font size used is typically smaller and some of those pages are chock full of big blocks of text.
It’s so much more palatable to read just 300 pages of a manga, which is a nice blend of art and text. Yes, these Manga Classics sometimes have more words on the page than most other manga I read, but compared to the original text, it is a lot less. It’s almost like getting an abridged version, cutting out all the lengthy descriptions of scenery or mundane activities.
Overall, I read this fairly quickly and liked it well enough. I honestly can’t say that I would go out of my way to check out the original novel or any of the other adaptations, but I’m glad I can say that I’m at least more familiar with the story than I was before this.
All right, 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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