This graphic novel of Terry Pratchett's Discworld book "Guards! Guards!" is certainly adequate as an adaptation of the original story, maintaining the original plot structure and characters, but I found the illustration style singularly distracting. Of course, we all have our own ideas about how characters in favorite novels should look, and for the most part I have been satisfied with the way that various illustrators have depicted the many inhabitants of Discworld. But for the most part I found the illustrations in the present volume just too, well, cartoonish. Terry Pratchett over the years has succeeded brilliantly in making a fundamentally ridiculous fantasy universe seem supremely real, but the illustrations in this graphic novel destroys much of that seeming reality. The streets and buildings of Ankh-Morpork as seen here are fine -- quite convincing -- but the characters themselves are mostly refugees from a cheap comic book. Sam Vimes? Sergeant Colon? Lance-Corporal (and soon to be Captain) Carrot? Nope -- they cannot look like this.
