There's a big storm brewing.
As common as the practice is, it can be pretty tricky to adapt an existing story for the comic medium. Far too many of these adaptations are rushed, poorly executed affairs that disrupt the flow of the source material. Even when the adaptation is competently handled, readers are often left with a story that regurgitates the source material without bringing anything new or exciting to the table. That's the case with Dark Horse's take on Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It's competent, but doesn't offer much for readers already familiar with the text.
It's disappointing that P. Craig Russell couldn't accomplish more here, considering the great work he did adapting Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano's illustrated prose story Sandman: The Dream Hunters several years ago. Sadly, this issue amounts to little more than a slavishly faithful riff on the novel's first chapter. The dialogue and narration are pretty much lifted directly from the text. Readers are introduced to main protagonist Shadow as he slogs through his final days of prison, suffers an unexpected tragedy, returns to the real world and encounters the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday.
Mind you, Neil Gaiman's writing is refined enough that his words sound great regardless of form or context. This issue still succeeds in introducing Shadow, molding him into a compelling (if very mysterious) character and emphasizing the pervasive sense of apocalyptic doom propelling him along in his journey. But rarely does this issue accomplish anything with Gaiman's words that the novel doesn't do better. The text really needed to be further streamlined to suit this visual medium. There's rarely an excuse for any comic to cram so many words onto a page whenthe purpose of the artwork is to shoulder the storytelling burden.
However, there are a few instances where Russell (who also serves as layout artist) and artist Scott Hampton take advantage of the medium's unique ability to convey silence. Shadow is a character who struggles to both show and feel emotion, and several sequences abandon dialogue and rely on silence to convey the emptiness in his soul.
Even with Hampton providing finishes to Russell's layouts, there are times when the art in this issue comes across as loose and unfinished. Characters vary in detail and backgrounds tend to be pretty barren. To a point, all of this emphasizes the coldness of the prison setting and the approaching storm, but that doesn't change the fact that the figures don't show the emotional range needed. It's telling that the book becomes much more engaging during the epilogue sequence, which Russell illustrates himself and does a better and more consistent job of adding visual flourish to Gaiman's flowery prose.
The Verdict
American Gods: Shadows is shaping up to be a competent adaptation of the source material, but one that only sporadically uses the new medium to good effect. The rest of the time, the heavy reliance on Gaiman's original text begs the question of why readers shouldn't just turn to the novel instead.
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