The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle - ★★

AUTHOR: Peter S. Beagle

ADAPTOR: Peter B. Gillis

ILLUSTRATORS: Renae De Liz & Ray Dillon

SERIES: The Last Unicorn Comics 1-6.

GENRE: Graphic Novel

PUBLICATION DATE: January 25, 2011

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A graphic novel adaptation of the classic fantasy story. Fabulous illustrations, but the story execution was too uneven to comprehend well. Perhaps I'd have liked this better had I read the actual novel instead of this illustrated version. This is an outlier review.

Plot Preview:

A beautiful unicorn has been living around in a forest for as long as she can remember. But when she overhears some wandering humans talking, she finds out that they believe there are no other unicorns in the world. To know the truth of whether she is indeed the last unicorn, she sets out on a journey. But it turns out to be a far more dangerous and revelatory quest than she had anticipated.

The fifty-year-old children's classic novel was adapted in a comic series of six volumes. This graphic novel is a compilation of those six comics.

I had heard of this book and thought the comic adaptation would be a great way of accessing the story. But in retrospect, I think I made the wrong decision.

The book did start well for me. The Midnight Carnival in the first comic was quite interesting. But soon, the pacing as well as the plot development started to dip. After a while, I struggled to stay invested in the story.

The storyline is somewhat straightforward but overly episodic. Perhaps it fits the multi-comic structure but reading it at a go as a single graphic novel meant that I could see barely any connection between the start and the end.

Further, the adaptation skips over several important details. Some characters’ backstories and other subplots are not revealed in enough detail. As such, the story feels a bit unwieldy for this format. Many things weren't clear to me even till the end.

The unicorn is a key character but her presence is barely there after a point. The other characters have their strengths but they are somewhat monotonous. All their lives change after the unicorn's adventurous quest, but their character arc stays flat, as if there's no growth from their learnings.

The writing was also a bit too poetic for my taste with an overload of metaphors and flowery language. Many captions and speech bubbles had a lot of textual content but with no sensible meaning.

The tale offers the feel of a fable, but I couldn't really see its attraction to children. Then again, I've not had great luck with many popular old children's classics (‘Water Babies’, ‘Tuck Everlasting’ and ‘A Little Princess’ to name a few), so perhaps my tastes don't match the writing styles in some children’s books of the past.

A graphic novel version is, of course, not just the story but the illustrations as well. And that's where this book delivers excellently. The watercolour art style is put to great use. The colouring cleverly depicts the contrast of darkness and doom versus light and victory.

Overall, I'm very disappointed that I didn't like this book better but I can't give it a higher rating just because it's a classic. Perhaps it might have clicked better if I had read the actual book, but this graphical adaptation left me mostly bored. The illustrations saved my experience.

Then again, this is a beloved children’s classic with many fans. So it might just be that my jinxed track record with old kids classics hit again. Instead of dismissing the book outright, do read other reviews to take a better call. That said, I would still not recommend the graphic novel version.

Recommended only to fans of the classic book who might be interested in seeing it come alive through fantastical illustrations.

2 stars, all for the illustrations.