20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

How bad is Campfire's adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Let me count the ways.

1. Most of the characters, the submarine the Nautilus, and the backgrounds are all copied almost exactly from Disney's 1954 movie, with extremely minor variations. Can you say "copyright violation" -- or just "lazy"?

2. Despite the fact that this volume was produced in India and drawn by an Indian artist (Bhupendra Ahluwalia), the villainous Captain Nemo is drawn as a white man, when Verne made clear in the Leagues sequel The Mysterious Island that Nemo was a Hindu prince.

3. The adaptation (scripted by Dan Ritter) is oddly paced, throwing in full- or half-page splashes when they do not serve the story and many pages with the action crammed into five, six or even seven panels. The wrong notes get the most emphasis throughout the book, leaving us with a book devoid of drama.

4. Even though this is a condensed version of Verne's novel, new bits (like Professor Aronnax's monstrous dream in the first few pages) are added to no effect, major plot elements appear nowhere, and minor scenes like the eating of an electric ray remain.

5. The lettering is awful. Thought balloons look like jellyfish rather than anything like has been drawn in comics for the last 80 years.

6. A three-page action sequence features a shark that appears to switch species every other panel.

7. The final, dreadful confrontation with the giant squid-slash-Kraken starts off with no drama, no emotion, no feeling of danger. It's as if every emotion has been drained out of the story. This is typical of the entire book.

8. Although the coloring occasionally stands out, most of it is muddy, basic computer coloring that makes the whole product look cheap.

9. Most of the sea creatures listed in the book's educational back matter appear nowhere in the graphic novel, divorcing the learning opportunity from the book students may have just slogged through.

I could go on, but you don't need 20,000 reasons not to buy this graphic novel. Only one will do: it's awful.

Of course, if you don't believe this review, you can always buy the digital graphic novel from Amazon.