It's a comics adaptation of a Seth Grahame-Smith novel from 2009, which of course is based on Jane Austen's 1813 Pride and Prejudice. The 2009 novel reached number three on the New York Times bestseller list and has since spawned further novels in the same universe by another writer (Steve Hockensmith). There was a live-action film in 2016 (starring Matt Smith, among others)... and of course this 2010 graphic novel by Tony Lee and Cliff Richards. I hadn't hitherto taken much interest in all this, partly because I'm a massive Jane Austen fan and have low tolerance of bad parodies of her work. One day, though, I saw the graphic novel on special offer and bought it.
It's terrible. Everything they did to it made it worse.
Firstly, the storyline. 1813 England isn't fighting the Napoleonic Wars, but instead is facing a zombie apocalypse. They're managing surprisingly well. Society hasn't really been disrupted. Everyone seems to have studied martial arts in either China or Japan, which needed explaining (and doesn't get it) because Edo-era Japan had a "sakoku" policy of national isolation. The few foreigners they allowed in were restricted to a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki. Anyway, this book's katanas-and-kung-fu English warriors are so good at killing that the zombies are incidental and make almost no impact on the plot. We glimpse them in passing sometimes, but any within range of our heroes will instantly get slaughtered. That's the limit of their involvement. The plot is basically just Jane Austen's original, with only minor tweaks.
What's the point of the story? What's the parody saying? Well, there's a running gag about the early 19th century's casual acceptance of brutality and violence. This seems unrelated to zombies. Mr Darcy is called the kindest soul in England because the speaker's only seen him inflict one savage beating on a servant. Our genteel, elegant heroes are in fact callous and frightening. Vicious whippings are normal. Someone gets beaten so badly that's he's crippled for life... by one of our heroes, deliberately, as a punishment. This is somewhat amusing and has some basis as a criticism of the historical era. I like it. It gives the narrative a point. Unfortunately, though, it means that Elizabeth Bennet (i.e. Austen's heroine) is a sadist who'll decapitate a perfectly normal woman because she feels like it, in mid-conversation. Her idea of practice sparring is to the death. She says things like this:
"But better to burn a few innocents than let the guilty run free. I cannot help but feel a sense of joy as I watch their bodies hasten down to hell."
That's part of the parody, of course. Maybe it works better in the novel? In this comic, though, characterisation feels shallow and the main effect of an unlikeable Elizabeth was to make me dislike her. She's cool when swearing violence against Mr Darcy, but otherwise eurgh. Meanwhile, the katanas and kung fu feel like trashy ahistorical bullshit. (Because they are, of course. Complaining about this is almost a category error.) Also, more fundamentally, zombifying Jane Austen's story has made it stupider and less thoughtful. You don't need to understand the era or grasp social subtleties, because HEY LOOK ZOMBIES! Making the plot and character points more violent and garish means there's less for a reader to think about. This is the kind of story idea that could have been hilarious in an 8-page joke strip, but fails to carry 166 dialogue-heavy pages.
Hmm. I see I've reached Tony Lee. He's not the main offender here, but he didn't help. The book's a slog to get through, with insufficient attention paid to the problems of adapting this story to an ill-suited medium. It's also cruder than Austen, with vulgar language that isn't funny.
As for Cliff Richards (best known for Buffy/Angel comics), he didn't fit this project. He can draw hot women and zombies, sure, but this is a long, verbose literary adaptation (albeit loose) and heavily dependent on its cast. The Bennet family alone has five daughters and their parents, all of whom must be instantly recognisable and pop off the page. That doesn't happen. His pencilling is beautiful, mind you. I'd be happy to read his Buffy comics. However, the dialogue scenes don't fizz enough and it takes effort to tell which daughter's which. Then, on top of that, this is a black-and-white book with no colourist or inker... but Richards's artwork gives the impression of needing both. Okay, yes, technically ink does seem to have been applied, but these lines look so white and empty that I'm mildly outraged that this got published in this form. Hire an inker! Paint some blacks! (That said, though, there are things to like in the line variation in his pencils.)
Naaah. Avoid this one. It drags on too long and talks too much to be successful trash, but it's a fundamentally trashy concept and just not very interesting as a Jane Austen adaptation. Comics were probably the worst medium for it. I imagine the novel and the movie brought the characters alive in a way that doesn't happen here. Also, I disliked our thuggish heroine, who could have been intriguing (a Jane Austen romantic heroine who'll cut your head off) but the dichotomy never really went anywhere and she never managed to be more memorable than the scene when she rips off her skirt to make it easier to kick zombies.
