Sweeney Todd - the graphic novel
Adapted by Sean Michael Wilson, art by Declan Shalvey.
Nominated for a Stan Lee Excelsior Award, 2013 - and WON!
Classical Comics, Spring 2012, 160 pages.
Oddily enough, I WAS the character Sweeney Todd in my primary school play when I was 10 years old and now here we have the graphic novel, which has just been shortlisted for the Stan Lee Excelsior Awards, 2013. An excellent series of events that promotes reading and understanding of graphic novels in British school kids - and after reading the 8 books on the shortlist they vote for their favourite.
Win! - Our book won the JABICA Award (Judge A Book By Its Cover Award) of the 2013 'Stan Lee Excelsior Awards', which are voted for by 1000s of school kids in the UK. Nice!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQeMxTUrE3M
This is the classic novel that brought to life in full colour! From his barber shop in Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd murders selected customers to steal the Some suspect he is up to no good, but no one knows how he actually kilose of the bodies? And what is his connection with Mrs. Lovett who runs a popular pie shop nearby? Will Colonel Jeffery discover what happened to his friend Thornhill after he visited Todd for a shave? And will the heartbroken Johanna Oakley ever find out what happened to her beloved Mark Ingestrie? Perhaps Todd's shop boy Tobias Ragg will uncover the barber's dark secrets - "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" is a tale that has become part of London folklore. Adapted from the original serialised story "The String of Pearls", published in weekly instalments in "The People's Periodical" from November 1846 to March 1847, this graphic novel breathes new life into the legendary barber who "polished 'em off".
Reviews
"A brilliant resource, beautifully executed. Every school should have copies and every school library NEEDS these publications. If we are serious about the raising of reading and writing standards then resources like these are a MUST." - Alan Peat, Educational Consultant
"Absolutely fantastic. I really loved this graphic novel. The pictures are great. I couldn't stop reading it. Being such a simple and classic story, it was the best read I've had in ages. I wish it never ended." - Annie, Amazon.co.uk review
(that one is so good it sounds like i made it up, but its a real review, honest guv!)
"Knowing that this was adapted virtually verbatim from a mid-19th Century "penny dreadful", I was somewhat leery of what to expect. Quite frankly, I was expecting it to be a 19th Century exploitation crime-horror piece, and somewhat badly written. Shockingly, this was not the case at all, and while the novel is certainly no Dickens or Melville, it is competently written, not dumbed-down for the lower class masses that might be expected to be the primary audience of the original, and fairly restrained (in a Hitchcock vein) when it comes to the explicit portrayal of violence.
All in all, quite a literary cut above the sort of lowbrow period mass entertainment I was expecting. I was riveted by the story, despite having seen the movie with Johnny Depp, and knowing full well what to expect in terms of both whodunit and how. A story that has perhaps been unfairly ignored in its original literary form, this appears to be a quite faithful and well-wrought adaptation. It certainly encourages me to seek out other famous stories of the penny dreadful era in a similar vein, such as "Varney the Vampire" and "Spring-Heeled Jack"." - Denis M Roy, 5 star Amazon review.
The book can be bought here:
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1907127097
