2 out of 5

Ugh.  Quick pro-tip from a non-pro: an adaptation ideally adapts something from one format to another.  Ideally this means that, in adapting it, you’re doing so in a way that it benefits or is added-to in the translation.  Simply transcribing the text and deciding panel splits based on how much of that text you can fit into each panel is sort of missing the point.  Orchid is “a collection of Victorian short stories adapted to comic form” by some indie kids.  Indie kids here signifies, in terms of art, people with distinctive styles but little grasp on clean, legible design, or damnable boring work that just gets us from A to B.

Some of the stories are okay.  Tobermory, the only really comical tale here about a talking cat, is cleanly told by Gabrielle Belle.  If not for the mismatched tone of the tale – meaning if Orchid had been primarily humorous – it would work well.  But unfortunately it’s left as the odd man out.  Ben Catmull’s ‘The Little Red Man’ (Ben being the reason I bought this book (…bought it, uh, used anyway)) has a lacking beginning / ending feeling, which isn’t so unusual for Catmull, but he brings a distinctive and haunting visual style to things and I would say effectively gets the point and tone across, so it’s a pass.  The flipside of this is ‘The Story of the Demoniac Pacheco.’  Jessie Reklaw’s art is wonderfully moody and the scripted lettering works well for the journal-entry storytelling, but Lark Pien’s adaptation is a tragic misfire: confusing and boring.  ‘The Tomb of Sarah’ isn’t as confusing or boring, but it has the same problem as ‘Pacheco’ – wonderfully ghastly art, just not the best paced adaptation.  As mentioned above, it’s a bit too clearly taken from a story that’s not meant to be a comic.  The two worst offenses are David Lasky’s Raven ‘adaptation,’ which is more like a college art project (the text is literally transcribed over blank panels that eventually form the shape of a raven), and Dylan Williams’ (art) and Rhoda Broughton’s (script) The Man With the Nose, which is incompetent on both creative’s behalves: the characters and telling are completely uninvolving, and Williams draws two boring characters saying boring things in static, boring panels for pages and pages.  Thankfully, the middle of the book has the interesting ‘Green Tea’ by Kevin Huizenga.  It’s not perfect, but Kevin at least tries to actually ‘adapt’ something by adding a framing story which I have to believe wasn’t in the original, and he uses this to spin up some reader involvement right away, whereas the core tale it’s retelling might’ve taken a few more pages to do so.

So the hit-to-miss ratio is pretty low.  The covers are nice though.