Review - Battlestar Galactica: Volume 1

This is my review of the graphic novel Battlestar Galactica: Volume 1. I’ve mentioned before about how much better graphic novels look on a bookshelf than regular comic books and this one maintains my thought about that. However there is one little extra thing to this graphic novel, this is a hardcover book. My copy came with a dust jacket with a photo of the actress Tricia Helfer on the cover. The actual cover of the book has a black gloss finish with the Battlestar Galactica emblem in the middle. Looks good with or without the dust jacket. I got my copy from Cinequest.com earlier this year as an impulse buy.

The binding was a little less than perfect as four of the pages in my copy were loose at the bottom half of the pages. The top of the pages are fine but the bottom did not take very well. It still holds together and you can’t tell if you leave the book closed but if you open the book the pages fan out from the rest of the book. As a presentation, a hardcover graphic novel looks really sharp. Publishers, in this case Dynamite Entertainment, are making graphic novels more and more as hardcover books and I really like this format.

The book has 144 full color pages on high gloss paper. There are additional pages at the end of the book that has notes from the illustrator on some of his creative notes while drawing the comic. This story falls between some of the episodes on the television series but does not directly coincide or affect the show. The premise of the story is the Galactica comes across an older model medical ship that is full of humans that have otherwise been missing for many years or have been confirmed as dead. The surviving colonials are torn between seeing those who have been gone so long again and being suspicious of another possible Cylon trick. There are twists and surprises at every page turn.

The story is written by comic writer Greg Pak (his official website) who has done a lot of writing for Marvel Comics and has also done some screenplay work for movies. Seems like Pak did a lot of research on the show and the characters from the show as they were very familiar to me in the way they acted in the book. Either that or he was just a fan of the show himself and wrote from the first hand knowledge he had.

His story line moves along very fluidly and it kept me turning the pages. Although it’s not very long I usually take my time when reading graphic novels and something of this length would take me about 3 casual sittings to finish. I like to read the stories and sit back and take in as much as the artwork as I can. I finished this in one sitting as I wanted to know what was going to happen next and if a mystery that was unfolding would get resolved. They didn’t always get resolved and he does a great job of creating cliffhangers that make you want to read more with out getting upset about not knowing what is coming next. Some authors leave cliffhangers that can get tiresome but these were well done and just had me wanting more.

He also had a great way of holding the story together. Much like the show did the story would bounce back and forth between 3 or 4 settings. When you do something like that it can be difficult to keep the separate sub stories going while keeping the main story all held together. The show had great editing to make sure it didn’t suffer from that problem and while reading this I felt he must have taken a good amount of time to edit himself into making sure he kept it all together.

The artwork was done by Nigel Raynor who stated that when he got the assignment he had just started watching the show and was becoming a fan. Honestly I was a little split on his artwork. Raynor has a great eye for giving action to a comic. He understands movement and how to give something a feeling of life, but I wasn’t overly excited about the way he did the characters. Drawing the human form is no problem for him. He has that down, no question about that. In fact I think he tends to lean towards drawing the female form more than the male.

The male forms were fine but at some points I felt like I was reading an Anime comic in regards to the women. They all seemed to be these doe-eyed women who looked submissively up at whoever they were speaking to. Excuse me but the President Laura Roslin is the political leader of all the survivors and she looks up to some one? She never even gave Adama that kind of response. She was about the only person on the show brave enough to look him square in the eye. Then the Kara “Starbuck” Thrace character looking submissive? Ok I can buy that she may have acted around Adama like that as he was sort of a surrogate father to her but to be submissive to anyone else was certainly not the Starbuck I had seen on the show. Fact of the matter was her character always had up her toughened façade so others would not know how vulnerable she really was. She also looked like a 15 year old girl to me, I don’t think it did justice to Katee Sackhoff.

The other thing that I wasn’t really thrilled about was Adama looked like he was too ‘battle scarred’. Its true Adama is supposed to be the old battle hardened and scarred solider but Raynor went to out of the way to try and convey this point. His depiction of him was so scarred that he was almost comical. It kind of reminded me of how the old Dick Tracy villains looked.

However Raynor did an excellent job on the ships and the battles in space. I also liked the way he drew the Cylons especially the classic ones. He puts a lot of fine detail into making those come to life and blending them in smoothly with their background and actions. Like I said I was kind of split on his artwork.

So I liked the story but was split on the artwork and then factoring in the bad binding my copy had I’m giving this a 7 out of 10. It was good enough that I enjoyed it but it probably won’t be a story I’ll be reading again very soon. This was only the first volume of a three volume set so I will probably get the other two volumes to see how the story line ends. Besides, maybe the artwork will grow on me a bit.

Frak it! I’m done.