Every photo has a story to tell.
Creative Staff
Story: Ransom Riggs
Art/Adaptation: Cassandra Jean
What They Say
A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob on a journey to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.
The Technical:
As usual, Yen Press pulled no punches in their presentation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The book is hardcover with a slip jacket and is printed on good quality glossy paper. The size isn’t too large, which means it will sit as a nice collectors item on a shelf and won’t hurt your wrists as you try to read it.
Cassandra Jean’s art instantly brought to mind a more refined Natsume Ono. She shares the thick and sketchy pen work style as the Japanese manga artist, but has a keener eye for detail in faces. That attention to detail is needed to convert the photographs of real people into comic version that resemble their originals. The backgrounds tend toward impressionistic mires of thick black lines in swirling patterns, giving an easy feeling to the strange events and focusing on mood rather than scenery.
More interesting though is the use of color in the book, and the use of old photographs. The present day scenes are stark black and white pen work devoid of color. When the story talks of the past, or Jacob slips back into Miss Peregrine’s world, watercolor illuminates the scenes in an eerie pastel glow. It frames the mysterious past as a more lively, lived in place than the stark reality of the black and white present. Usually in narrative stories the past is portrayed in the opposite, where the present is colorful and the past is the sepia tones of photographs of the time. Cassandra’s approach is more in line with the Wizard of Oz.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The latest in Yen Press young adult to manga adaptations is a gloriously glossy adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s home for Peculiar Children. It’s a title I think I may have only vaguely heard of until this book arrived for review, although I can see why the story is growing in popularity.
The story follow Jacob Portman, a sixteen year old kid with a completely average life and childhood. He has a part time job he doesn’t care for and an air of the jaded around him. We find Jacob reminiscing about time he spent listening to his elderly grandfather’s stories about growing up in an orphanage, and the mysterious photos which captured his imagination until he was old enough to link truth and fiction. The stories take on a sad air when Jacob realizes his grandfather’s childhood was entangled with the horrors of WWII.
It’s a extremely clever start for the series, creating a smart mystery out of real trick photos from the early 1900’s. They’re mixed in through the panel composition, and to any modern reader readily identifiable as tricks. Usually I find photography and drawings mixed together distracting, but there’s enough of an otherworldly feel to the story that it works. A notebook like quality to the way the comic is framed that lends to to feeling grounded in some sort of reality.
Jacob ends up being present for his grandfather’s final moments, which are far from peaceful and sets him off on a journey to find out more about his grandfather’s childhood. It leads him across the sea to a small island off the coast of England. In pursuit of his grandfather’s childhood the artwork grows eerier, the weather worse, the people stranger. Eventually Jacob wanders into the bombed out orphanage where his grandfather lived and comes in contact with the ghosts of his grandfather’s past.
It’s then that Jacob realizes that his grandfather’s stories weren’t tall tales, but a truth far stranger than fiction. The children with seemingly magical abilities in the photos actually existed, and still do.
It’s also where I felt the story started to fall flat. When the truth starts to come out it is spelled out in detail and suddenly it’s just another science fiction/fantasy story. The mystery disappears the second the bad guys show up, complete with their own fictional lexicon and terminology. The lead bad guy is obvious from the start, but where I hoped he’d be more devious he ends up just being a thug. When the monsters are out in the light for all to see they loose their mystique, they become just another zombie like mindless force. Rigg’s tries to add back in some historical flavor with a origin story referencing the Tunguska event, but by the final confrontation it becomes reminiscent of so many other supernatural young adult fiction on the market now.
I do like Jacob as a lead. He has a perpetual exhausted look in the art, so much so that it appears he has constant bags under his eyes and a haunted look on his face. His dogged determination is very much like the lead in a horror movie. The quicker pace of the comic means that the development of his relationship with the other children he encounters is rushed, but forgivable considering the format. It is unfortunate that Rigg’s felt it was necessary to make him ‘special’ in some way. Compared to other protagonists of this sort he feels more real and believable, and certainly far from invincible. Still, why can’t these kids ever just be normal?
The book ends on a cliffhanger, with a teaser for the upcoming sequel in the book series drawn up to hint at what is coming next. That’s probably the largest problem with the book, it’s only telling the first part in a longer story whose prose future is guaranteed, but whose manga future is not. Without knowing if it will ever get a proper comic ending, it exists as more of an advertisement then a standalone product.
In Summary
This manga style comic adaptation for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children does many things right. It has a unique style which conveys the uneasiness of the lead and the situation that he’s in, and gives the entire work an otherworldly feel that serves the story well. The story has a fantastic premise grounded in mysteries and family history, and Ransom Rigg’s love for old photographs created a fun jumping off point for a solid mystery. Unfortunately, the unique setup of the story falls away by the time it reaches it’s final pages, turning into a more typical adventure with many similar themes to other supernatural young adult works on the market. The cliffhanger ending was also a disappointment, and putting a preview for the next novel at the end in comic form is rubbing salt in an open wound. If there was any hint of a continuation I could give the book a higher grade, as of now it’s an appetizer more than a stand alone work.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B
Packaging Grade: A +
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: October 29th, 2013
MSRP: $20.00
