Beautiful Creatures by Loren Dunnam

1.      

      Beautiful Creatures has cartoony and loose illustrations. This work of art is a combination of water color type of black, white, and gray tones, sharp unrealistic types of lines with an abundance drawings of sound and movement. Besides the first couple of pages the whole book is in black and white. Therefore, it gives me a feeling of seriousness and past actions. I feel as if the art work in this novel is not unique to the story. This type of drawing can be found in many other types of graphic novels. Plus, since this story was first written in novel form it would not have been rooted from drawings. The fact that the first couple of pages were in color takes away from the rest of the book in my opinion.

2.      I believe Beautiful Creatures was written as a graphic novel to appeal to a new audience and to make more money. Beautiful Creatures was a novel at first then became a film and then a graphic novel. They are trying to make this the new Twilight. This story did lose its detail going from novel to film and graphic novel because the novel gave it more imagination to be used plus the people who play the film part and the people who were drew were nothing that I had imagined. This made it very hard to like any of the new media because of how a character can be made an image. The whole book, almost every frame needed juxtaposition. This graphic novels did not tell a story with just the words and it sure did not tell a story with just frames. They needed each other to survive. This graphic novel took away something very important from the story because of the nonexistent color. Without the color I cannot tell who is a dark caster and who is a light caster which is one of the main parts of the story line. The only way I would know in this book is to have a character tell me. This graphic novel should have stayed a fiction novel.
 

3.      Ethan Wate narrates this story. Along with some give from the leading lady Ethan Wate comes out of nowhere at the start and we follow him throughout the story. This came about because this was how the story was told in the novel. To being anyone else in to the narrator part would mess the whole story up and cause readers to put the book down a.s.a.p. There are parts that I found interesting. The parts when the main character (Ethan) and the leading lady (Lena) are talking in each other’s mind one set of bubbles are gray and the others are black which stand for the thoughts thought by Ethan and the thoughts thought by Lena. I did worry about how the artist was going to make this happen in the frames. Some of the graphic novel was at times confusing because of how much was being said. I did not get a break from reading because every frame had words.

4.      One scene in Beautiful Creatures that said a lot was the 13^th page of chapter four where Macon exists his bedroom and goes from a night gown to a perfectly tailor suit. Over the first of the book it is not said that Macon has “powers” but right here he lets it be known that he can do something “magic.”  This becomes a problem in the conclusion in the story. This happens to have a huge effect on the choice that Lena has to make.  This would be the one of a few frames that I admire in this graphic novel. Though this story has artwork that other people may like I do not care for it. I kind of makes me uneasy to read it.