Some quick thoughts on a couple of prose and prose-related books I've seen (but not read) recently

Comics writer G. Willow Wilson, who has written Air and Cairo for Vertigo and a Vixen miniseries for DC Comics proper, has a new novel out. That's the cover above. The cover design is very cool and appealing, and I really like the way the old-school shapes and letters are coated in the electronic, circuit board-looking pattern.

Wilson's name and the strong cover design, along with the timely subject matter (Arab Spring-like uprising, computer stuff, allusions to 1001 Nights) got me to contemplate picking it up at the library the other day, despite my aversion to prose fiction. And then I saw this blurb from Gregory Maguire on the back cover:

Driven by a hot ionic charge between higher math and Arabian myth, G. Willow Wilson conjures up a tale of literary enchantment, political change, and religious mystery. Open the first page and you will be forced to do its bidding: To read on.

It's high praise, but I'm afraid of a book that's going to boss me around and make me its slave. I'm just not looking for that sort of relationship with a book at this point.

Here's some more info on it, however, if it sounds like something you might be into.

I have no idea what this novel might be about, but that' s a hard title to completely ignore, isn't it? I like the cover design on it, as well, which gives the book two eye-catching elements.

This here's a good title too,but I was disappointed to learn upon flip-through that the "sights" were rather heavily related to the sounds, so there weren't many drawn images or...well, I don't know what I expected from the title, really, but I was hoping there would have been a lot of drawings and posters. There weren't. Still! Putting "whitey" in a title seems like a good strategy for attracting a reader's eyes to linger over your book, too.

Finally, I saw this in the library the other day:I haven't read those books or watched that TV show, but both seem extremely popular these days, thanks, I assume, to the widespread success of the TV show.

I flipped through the graphic novel adaptation in part to see if it looked anywhere near as terrible as the graphic novel adaptation of Jonathan Kellerman's Silent Partner that I recently suffered through (That had me thinking about the difficulties in adapting prose to comics).

I am pleased to report that no, the Game of Thrones gn did not look to be as poor of an adaptation as the Silent Partner one...at least, my flip-through revealed no pages that looked like walls of narration boxes, and while I saw more scenes of conversing than anything else in it, it didn't look as "talky" as your average Brian Michael Bendis Avengers franchise comic.

I'd be interested in reading a good, solid review of it at some point, hopefully from someone familiar with comics in general and the books and TV show (Sean T. Collins would be ideal), as I think it makes for a curious sort of prose-to-comics adaptation. Because the original, prose version has already been adapted into the highly visual format of television, the graphic novel creators would therefore have probably had access to that adaptation for suggestions on visualizing and staging aspects of it. In other words, this might be an adaptation that could adapt parts of a previous adaptation if the adapters so chose.