I have never read a graphic novel, so take this all with a grain of salt…
It turns out that the first of Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper books, Clean Sweep, is now on an graphic novel app called Tapas. So I’m trying it, and kind of enjoying it. The artwork is really good, and not too far off of how I imagined the characters and the inn, which is always iffy with movies, and also, I guess, with graphic novels.
They offer short episodes, and posted about 10 or 12 of them to start, and now additional ones are supposed to come out one per week for a year to make 52 total episodes, per the IA blog. And the first three are free to try. After that you have to buy “ink tokens” to get the remaining episodes, but they have specials and stuff that make it a little cheaper. Or you can wait for some of the episodes to go free after a while. And if you subscribe to be notified of new episodes, or put it on auto-buy when you scroll through from one episode to the next, you get some price breaks too. Still, on their blog, IA estimated that it works out to about 30 cents per episode, and there will be 52 episodes, so it’s going to end up being quite a bit more than I would normally pay for an e-book.
But this is an experiment for me more than anything else, and I’m enjoying it enough to see this one through. I’m not sure how easy it would be to follow the plot if I didn’t already know the story pretty well, but I do, and I’m finding that it’s kind of a fun thing to wind down with at night. And I’m also not sure how much subtlety gets lost in the graphic version, which is another complaint of mine with movies, but again, since I know the original well, I can’t really tell – my mind is filling in the details. There is supposed to be some original content coming up, though, created by the person who adapted it for the graphic format, so maybe I’ll get a bit of a feel from that. (Apparently they needed some additional content to be able to have 52 full episodes…)
And it turns out there’s also a Spanish-language version, and I’m trying to work on my Spanish with my daughter-in-law, who’s from Mexico, so I’m following that one too, which is kind of fun. Even though I’m now spending twice what I normally would.
Anyway, I’m curious to know if anyone else is trying this out, and if you like it.
Oh, and if you want to find it in the Tapas app, it’s called The Innkeeper Chronicles, not Clean Sweep. So I’m kind of wondering whether, if this one is deemed to be successful, if they’ll just slide into the next one for next year…
Also, there’s a lot more about this on the IA blog – here are a few links:
– original announcement: https://ilona-andrews.com/2022/surprise-innkeeper-announcement/
– more info about Clean Sweep and Tapas: https://ilona-andrews.com/2022/all-about-clean-sweep-and-tapas/
– how to use Tapas: https://ilona-andrews.com/how-to-use-tapas/
Not a big fan of comics anymore, but I am loving this. To see their interpretation of the inn and how the magic works is fascinating. I also love the artwork. As with you, I am really familiar with the books, so I don’t know how a newbie would feel, but I think they may find it interesting. I want everyone to read it so they do more. (I would love KD in this)