I wanted to love this. I really did. I am a huge Tim Hunter fan from when the original BoM mini-series was released by DC/Vertigo back in 1989, and I've followed most every iteration of the character since then. I love Harry Potter, but Tim will always be closer to my heart because I met him first. Somehow, this series of paperback adaptations of the Neil Gaiman, and then John Ney Rieber, comics made it past me when they originally came out. I tripped across this one in a used bookstore. I was excited. By the end of the book, I appreciated the hard spot writer Carla Jablonski was in but even understanding the challenges she faced didn't mitigate the fact that I was disappointed with the book.So let's talk about that hard spot Jablonski was in. She had to take a property many young adult readers will look as as a "Harry Potter knock-off," and adapt existing comic-book scripts into paperback form. In addition to the difficulty of adapting comics to prose, she had to deal, at least in this initial book, with the fact that most of the characters Tim encounters, including the so-called Trenchcoat Brigade who introduce him to magic, are DC Comics characters with complex histories of their own that are both peripheral and integral to Tim's story. I'm sure copyright issues are to blame for the herky-jerky nature of Tim's trip through time (the Altantean sorcerer he meets is never named in this version as Arion in this version, and thus the reason for his crotchety response to Tim's presence feels a bit awkward and ill-explained, for example) and his tour of the modern era (DC couldn't really force Zatanna out of the story without changing the very nature of it, but I feel like there were more DC magical characters in the original story).Once Tim heads into the Realms of Faerie and the Far Future, the story falls into a bit of a better rhythm. Jablonski had one advantage over Gaiman: she had access to the stories written by John Ney Rieber that flesh out Tim's family and school life, and was able to drop names and descriptions into this book to make the introduction of those characters in the second book a little less awkward. The book shines for the brief time where Titania, Queen of Faerie, and her court are on the page, and you can see that Jablonski really does like Tim Hunter and wants to tell his story well. But once Tim is journeying into the future, the book returns to feeling like a straight adaptation; I never really got a feeling for Mr. E's motivations in the original story, and it doesn't play any better in this version -- I still feel like Mr. E is less a character than he is a plot device (unlike Tim's other three guides -- John Constantine, Dr. Occult, and even The Phantom Stranger -- who at least feel like characters with greater depth from the way Jablonski handles their dialogue and interactions with Tim).I will probably seek the next book out in used bookstores, because it's not fair to judge Jablonski solely on her version of what would probably be the most difficult Tim Hunter story to adapt (precisely because of how much it relies on knowledge of the rest of the DC Universe and how magic operates therein). Perhaps once she's into adapting stories that are purely about Tim and his discovery of his abilities, her own talents will shine better.
The first time I read this book I really didn't have any idea about the world of comics. The characters were just characters that appear in the course of a book and they were all just as fresh to me as Tim Hunter was. That was several years ago and I've learned just a little bit more about the word of comics. Not a whole lot, but enough that I recognize some of these names. I also find it fun that I can now see Neil Gaiman in these books, where I don't think I saw him before.Beyond that, I liked this book. It was quite the adventure and a great call to adventure. :D
What do You think about The Invitation (2003)?
Aceptable adaptación novelada de la miniserie de comic escrita por Neil Gaiman y dibujada por verdaderos talentos del noveno arte. Claro que todo lo que aporta los espectaculares dibujos en el comic no lo llega a verse compensado literariamente con la eficiente pero lineal prosa de Jablonski. También quita puntos que no aparezcan varios de los personajes del Universo DC que estaban originalmente en el comic (por problemas de derechos, supongo) y que se infantilicen un par de escenas para no alterar al público infantil, verdadero "target" de esta adaptación. No es imprescindible pero en conjunto es una obra que cierra, que resulta una buena plataforma de despegue para el comic original y que va a gustar a los fans de Gaiman y a algún que otro harrypottero despistado que piense que Tim Hunter nació como una burda copia del anteojudo de la cicatriz, aunque lo preceda por varios años.
—Federiken Masters
So apparently this book originally was published as a comic book written by Neil Gaiman, then recently got "literized" and was written as a novel. I didn't realize this was the case until I read the forward. I picked up this one on a whim because I was in the mood for something a bit creepy and Gaiman definitely can deliver that. And as I started in on the book, I could totally see how this book would have made a good comic book. All of the characters would be visually appealing.The story was a bit choppy, with one event happening right after another with hardly a transition between. One paragraph, Tim is in London, and the next paragraph, he's on an airplane. That's magic, I guess.It wasn't a bad book. But I haven't decided if I'm going to read the other books in the series. Maybe that tells me something.
—Jessica N.
