I absolutely love Neil Gaiman and The Graveyard Book novel, so I was super excited to read the graphic novel! I bought the single-volume graphic novel because I knew I would want to read/own both volumes anyway, and I'm so glad I did because the first volume leaves at a real cliffhanger!

The Graveyard Book begins with a hired killer- The Man Jack- who is sent to murder a family of 4. The Man Jack only succeeds in killing 3 of them, though, leaving a toddler to wander off into a nearby graveyard. When the ghosts of the graveyard learn that the baby is being hunted, they promise to protect the boy, giving him the sanctuary of the graveyard. They name him Bod and the Owens and his caretaker, Silas, spend into Bod's teenage years caring for him. Each chapter of the book tells a story from a different age in Bod's life, from his run-ins with witches to becoming friends with a real, live girl!

First, the graphic novel text reads just as clearly and interestingly as the novel, exciting the reader to flip page after page (and totally forgetting that you were had a bedtime to stick to tonight, dangit!) However, the graphic novel adaptation does lose some of the beautiful language that Gaiman weaves through the novel. In addition, the chapters are illustrated by a variety of people (8 illustrators, to be exact,) so some of the visuals are hard to piece with each other. For example, in some of the stories, I didn't realize that the character was the same character from another chapter because they were illustrated so differently. That being said, he utilized one colorist, so the overall mood and tone of the novel stays the same for each setting. The contrast of color in some settings (such as the graveyard's blues vs the ghoul gate's reds) create a wonderful juxtaposition between the many worlds of the dead and the living. ( )

This was largely the same story as the book, though somewhat abridged, which meant some degree of characterization and the exact events were lost in translation. But I enjoyed the art (and was only somewhat flummoxed by the changing artists and styles). The core of the story was there. ( )

In The Graveyard Book, P. Craig Russell adapts Neil Gaiman’s novel for a graphic format, with art by Russell, Kevin Nowlan, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, Stephen B. Scott, and David Lafuente. The story faithfully adapts Gaiman’s original, with a Man Jack killing a family, only to find that their infant escaped to a nearby graveyard. There, the ghosts adopt him and give him the freedom of the graveyard in order to protect him from those who would do him harm. The boy, named Nobody Owens, grows up learning from ghosts who lived through every era of Britain’s history from Roman conquest to the mid-twentieth century. His guardian, Silas, teaches him more about the borderlands between the world of the living and the various magical worlds. Just as with Gaiman’s novel, Russell’s adaptation focuses on the magic of the world, with unexpected beauty and danger, all of it existing alongside our own lives. The decision to have different artists illustrate different chapters works to the book’s advantage, as each can use their particular style to bring out the subtleties of their respective chapter. This volume is a must-read for any fans of Gaiman’s novel as it uses the comic book medium to add to the story. Russell and Thompson, as previous collaborators with Gaiman, bring a particularly nice touch to this book. ( )