I’ve found these graphic novels to be a mixed bag. One decent-ish one, and three which were disappointing in various ways.

A misleading beginning

The first page shows us the Five lounging about on a sunny afternoon in the garden at Julian et al’s house. The garden slopes down to the road. So far so good. Dick is lying out on a tree branch, which is an amusing twist. I had reasonable hopes…

A waste of paper

Two pages are spent on jokes about Dick’s perch and him jumping/falling out of the tree.

Four pages are dedicated to the circus, though there are only about two panels which actually further the story, with Nobby suggesting they follow the circus. The rest are spent showing Nobby flipping around doing circus tricks.

Five pages pass while they persuade their mother to let them go, mixed with Dick doing acrobatics in a tree.

We are a quarter of the way into the book at this point and we see the caravans for the first time. Three pages later they set off.

While in the original novel we of course enjoy their meandering route, a further 16 pages of this graphic novel are used before they reach the circus. Several of those pages are used to show them nearly crashing into a cyclist (which seems to be a popular plot point in these adaptations).

Even Dick questions why they’re then hanging from a tree while claiming to be helping the cyclist.

So we’re over half-way through, and leaving less than 30 pages for the main adventure…

The long-awaited adventure?

Sadly, no. Instead we get nine pages of trampolining, elephant tennis, a chimp which looks like a small monkey… Again, lots of fun in the book where we had enough pages to dedicate to fun and jokes. It feels utterly wasted when we only have 64 pages.

Then it’s noted that Lou is missing and this is bad. Dan (not Tiger), uses eight pages to tell us that Lou’s in debt and was supposed to be paying it off with a cheque, having been recognised in a will after rescuing a woman from a fire.

We see his memory of Lou arriving back in the middle of the night, and he is very clearly the cyclist the Five ran into earlier.

Three pages are wasted as they realise that Lou is in his caravan, and then he smashes out of the door instead of just opening it like a normal person.

He rages a bit. Timmy runs off. Timmy returns later with Lou’s wallet and the cheque. End of story.

It’s not just Lou who’s raging

While the other graphic novels in the series annoyed me with pointless changes, this one makes them look like fine literature.

This is an atrocious adaptation which removes 99% of the original story and replaces it with tripe. Obviously fitting a 180 page novel into 64 pages with 4-6 panels on each requires a lot of abridgement, but the entire story has been abridged out of existence here, and replaced with a plot barely worthy of a short story. The storyline is so thin it can’t even support a graphic novel without dozens of pages of padding where nothing happens except people turning upside down then the right way up again. Oh and a three page argument about macaroni, don’t forget that.