TREASURE ISLAND

“Woohoo. Treasure Island, here we come!” So crows young Jim Hawkins in this notably lame and jumbled graphic adaptation of Stevenson’s classic. Crowding variously sized panels and sometimes-misplaced dialogue balloons atop one another, Kohlrus illustrates the tale with jumbles of generally static figures in ragged (but apparently freshly laundered) clothing and scenes of hard-to-follow action. The sound-bite dialogue is largely incidental to Jim’s severely truncated narrative, which is broken up into multiple captions on every page, includes unnecessary footnotes (“The Dry Tortugas are a small group of islands in the Gulf of Mexico”) and gives the whole outing a feeling of being told rather than shown. No competition for the robust adaptations of Tim Hamilton (2005) or Roy Thomas (2008), nor does it measure up to the standards set by the same publisher’s adaptation of Moby Dick, adapted by Lance Stahlberg and illustrated by Lalit Kumar Singh (ISBN: 978-93-80028-22-4). (Graphic fiction. 11-13)