{"id":1442,"date":"2011-09-19T13:06:47","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T17:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/?p=1442"},"modified":"2011-09-20T20:37:01","modified_gmt":"2011-09-21T00:37:01","slug":"js-take-on-nancy-drew-vampire-slayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/2011\/09\/19\/hrm\/js-take-on-nancy-drew-vampire-slayer\/","title":{"rendered":"J’s Take on Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nancy<\/a>It turns out Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer didn’t mean Nancy Drew was taking on the role of a vampire slayer. It’s just that the so-called mystery involved a vampire slayer. This is a two-part graphic novel story about Nancy Drew, which turns out to be ridiculously difficult to get through interlibrary loan. You’d think Nancy Drew + vampires + graphic novel would’ve been a definite library buy.<\/p>\n

Not that I can recommend it to any library book selectors, because it’s pretty bad.<\/p>\n

Nancy Drew has two friends, Bess and George. I was a little surprised to learn George was a girl, as two girl sidekicks is a little unusual. By the middle of the second volume, I was fantasizing they were a couple, just because it would’ve made things a little more interesting. And believe me, it needed all the help it could get.<\/p>\n

Nancy also has a boyfriend, Ned. And she likes finding mysteries to solve. Even when none exist. In this story, she befriends a pale dude whom everyone thinks is a vampire. He’s being stalked by a vampire slayer even.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the artwork, because that’ll be quick and easy. It struck me as uninteresting, uninspired, uncreative. It just was sort of there.<\/p>\n

Characters:
\nNancy — Man, is she annoying. Mostly because of all the narration. A lot of narration. Excessive narration. Superfluous narration. And do people really refer to their friends as ‘pals’? Like, repeatedly?<\/p>\n

Bess and George — Of course one of them, I already forget which, is like a computer hacker. Because every detective needs one of those if they aren’t one themselves. But mostly they just hang out and be girly and get themselves into trouble.<\/p>\n

Ned — Dude sports a collared shirt and a sweater! I mean, probably this is a hangover from the original books.. that’s the only reason I can think he’d be dressed like that. Unless he’s on his way to prep school. He also gets totally jealous of Nancy hanging out with this vampire, but never actually talks to her about it in any useful way.<\/p>\n

Vampire — This is going to be a total spoiler and ruin the mystery for you!!!! Okay, you’ve been warned. He has porpheria which means he can’t handle light and is totally obsessed with his homemade vegetable juice chock full of beta carotene. To the extent that he doesn’t seem to actually eat<\/i> anything. Also, he’s rich. And he totally faints for some reason. And he’s a recluse, for some reason, so he doesn’t know how to socialize with people. And Nancy feels all protective and ‘poor guy’ because of his illness and his inability to socialize and just ugh, ugh, ugh. I was given no reason at all to like this guy. Towards the end I was hoping he really was<\/i> a vampire and the whole porpheria thing was a lie, because then it wouldn’t have been so totally lame!<\/p>\n

Yea, I won’t even bother to go into the whole… twin thing.<\/p>\n

The mystery, was no mystery. The plot, was totally contrived. (Ohnoes, we’re trapped in the house with a vampire slayer. And I have no idea my plucky pals are right outside spying on us through the security cameras.)<\/p>\n

Nancy’s girlfriends (ah, if only they were<\/i> her girlfriends and not just friends who are girls) are obsessed with this vampire movie, “Dielight”. Which I thought was silly.. why not just name the movie you’re really thinking of? Or create a completely different<\/i> movie they’re obsessed with, like “My Creepy Stalker is a Vampire” or, y’know, something. But I was willing to let that pass without comment until there was a reference to Myfacespace or.. something like that. It just gets ridiculous.<\/p>\n

I did have to look at book 1 again to doublecheck, but nope, not a single person of color in either volume. Not even in the audience in the movie theatre. The characters come in just two shades: white and whiter.<\/p>\n

Finally, protip — it’s spelled straitjacket, not straight jacket, ‘k? Thnx.<\/p>\n

Also, did you know Nancy was in this vampire’s house before? In a previous graphic novel adventure starring a magician? What? You didn’t? Good thing they mention it at least three times in this one! Otherwise you’d miss out on running out to purchase it to find out what happened before in this house!!<\/p>\n

Did I mention I hate footnotes that try to sell you other books by the same author\/publisher? It’s like… let me just jar you out of the story for a minute for a commercial.<\/p>\n

In short: Save yourself time and money and skip this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It turns out Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer didn’t mean Nancy Drew was taking on the role of a vampire slayer. It’s just that the so-called mystery involved a vampire slayer. This is a two-part graphic novel story about Nancy Drew, which turns out to be ridiculously difficult to get through interlibrary loan. You’d think Nancy … Continue reading “J’s Take on Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,133,134,7],"tags":[38,17,61],"class_list":["post-1442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-j","category-nancy-drew-vampire-slayer","category-stefan-petrucha-sarah-kinney-and-sho-murase","category-review","tag-graphic-novel","tag-mystery","tag-ya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1442"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1477,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442\/revisions\/1477"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}