I've had to review several graphic novelizations of the beloved Gertrude Chandler Warner's Boxcar Children series. I hadn't read many of these in full-length form, since I was more of a Trixie Belden fan, but the graphic novels are wretched. A marketing company of some kind bought the graphic novel rights to the series, and they've killed the books. I'm not sure if its the crummy rendering of the characters (it's really hard to tell the Alden kids apart from each other or the characters they interact with in each novel) or the fact that the plots of each mystery are so condensed and chopped up that they are very difficult to follow. But what really irritated me about all of the ones I've read thus far are the random characters that appear and disappear with no explanation. I assume these mysterious folks are important characters in the full-length versions of the novels, but who the heck knows? Not me.
I suppose the graphic novels could be useful for very reluctant readers as an introduction and summary of the full-length books in the series, but I wouldn't waste the money.
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