Isabel Greenberg

Winner of the Best Book Award at the 2014 British Comic Awards Readers! This book is not a real encyclopedia! It is an epic work of fiction, detailing the many tales and adventures of one lonely storyteller, on a quest for Enlightenment and True Love. This book contains many stories, big and small, about and pertaining to the following things: Gods, monsters, mad kings, wise old crones, shamans, medicine men, brothers and sisters, strife, mystery, bad science, worse geography, and did we already mention true love? Critics are saying it is probably the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe even since bread knives.

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth

A collection of tales and adventures by a lonely storyteller who seeks to find true love and enlightenment.

Colleen

One of the last categories I needed to check off for my 2015 reading challenge was that of Graphic Novel. Admittedly, I have never been attracted to graphic novels. They just aren't my thing.

Since I don't like anime and Marvel has over-saturated the market with everything superhero related, I searched Goodreads for a graphic novel that didn't fall into either of those categories. I came across The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and was intrigued. So I requested it from my library. When it arrived, I surprised to find an over-sized, hardcover 176 page book. But with a shrug, I started reading.

I'm going to blame most of this low rating on my disinterest in graphic novels. But there just wasn't anything that interested me in this story. The drawings were a bit on the crude side both in terms of quality and in terms of unnecessary nudity. For a story that takes place primarily in frozen lands, there are a lot of naked man parts dangling awkwardly around. Maybe the rudimentary style was meant to be reminiscent of cave drawing style. I supposed that makes sense given the setting of "early Earth." But I did not find the drawings aesthetically pleasing AT ALL. And since the drawings are a crucial part of a graphic novel, I found it impossible to enjoy something full of drawings that kept inspiring me to make funny, unpleasant facial expressions.

The story itself was also lacking. It is a series of random smaller stories (largely based on Biblical stories and various cultural mythology) barely strung together with a thin tie-together plot. I couldn't decide whether the story was trying to be cheeky, irreverent of Christianity, or just too clever for it's own good. The stories weren't true enough to their originals to be interesting in that way, but they also weren't original enough to interest me. They felt more like halfhearted attempts to regurgitate old material. So overall, I'm going to go with "trying to hard to be clever." And failing. So little of the story actually concerned the main character, and there was absolutely no character development. He just paddled around and told lame replicas of stories.

The ending was an anticlimactic blob that was chucked at your face with the unrealistic expectation of being profound. It wasn't. And then, after the abrupt and unsatisfying ending, there is an appendices which contains a series of other random world-building stories that the author apparently couldn't tie into the barely held-together main story. So instead they were crammed in like an afterthought.

My primary thought upon finally finishing this novel was "YAY! IT'S OVER!" So that should adequately summarize my opinion of this work.

This review fulfills the "Graphic Novel" category of the Popsugar reading challenge. http://www.popsugar.com/love/Reading-...

Jessica Lord

BEAUTIFUL art and fun interwoven story. I really enjoyed this book!

Maggie Gordon

I am finding myself quite enamoured of Isabel Greenberg's graphic novels. She likes to engage in retellings of famous stories. They aren't super novel or creative retellings, but the flow of her tales works well, and the art is endearing. The Encyclopedia of Early Earth tackles creation myths, starting up in the northern arctic and travelling down to Antarctica. She makes stops in fake!Britain and fake!Middle East, though these are meant to represent an unrecorded times in our history. We get new myths, like the boy split into three people, as well as old, such as Cain and Abel. It's a book for younger readers, so there isn't necessarily a lot of depth to the stories, but they are worth a read and probably great to share with a kid. 

My one critique is that I wish Greenberg had included a section of tales from an African culture, and that more focus and individual stories came out of the fake!Middle East section of the book. (Was it fake!Middle East? It was the least grounded part of the book, in my opinion).

Jade Flynn

Read for my Arithmancy O.W.L 2020 #magicalreadathon2020. Prompt - Magical qualities of number 2: balance opposites - read something outside your favourite genre. Career - Auror (done). Extra completed O.W.L

b.andherbooks

Two soul mates, one from the North Pole and one from the South, discover to their horror they cannot come within two feet of one another. Determined they will find the cure for their fate, they marry anyways. But, how does one pass the years with a mate you cannot touch? With stories and legends of course! These stories compose the bulk of the Encyclopedia of Early Earth as we find out how the Nordic Man and his whole universe came to be. Early Earth’s history is oddly familiar, with variations of the flood myth, the Tower of Babel, and others, yet is ruled by one jerk of a deity, BirdMan and his two children, Kid and Kiddo. Author and illustrator Isabel Greenberg’s pokes fun at the classic and familiar mythologies of our world and her irreverence is both hilarious and poignant. Each tale is lushly illustrated with Nordic inspired graphics and a muted color scheme that uses bright pops of color to capture your eye. This is a graphic novel not to be missed.

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth

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