Loved it! I don't read a ton of graphic novels, but I want to read more and this is one that a friend read recently. I really enjoyed the experience.

The artwork was beautiful. The scenery and backgrounds were the best part, for me, they were gorgeous and really captured the epic world Tolkien wrote about. The characters reminded me of a cartoon of the Hobbit I used to watch as a child, so that nostalgia was also fun. The story was, of necessity, simplified, but I thought they did a great job with how they did that as well. Overall, I'd highly recommend to any Tolkien fans or anyone wanting to read Tolkien but without as big of a commitment.

I know that this edition wasn't released recently but the artwork,per se, was very simple which is not necessarily a bad thing but the different races like dwarves,men and elves are too similar for my taste.

At 15:57 I finished it while in my mulberry tree... listen to Florence + The Machine, Ceremonials, "All This and Heaven Too" and it describes how I can't describe how wonderful, sweet, adventurous, enjoyable, and... EVERYTHING this book is! Every author, this is the baseline that they all try to achieve. This is the incarnate reason why the human race reads and enjoys books, it perfectly demonstrates why books were ever written in the first place. It leaves you so happy in the end. What a tale! And it doesn't have to be preachy and up front about the morals, lessons, and values contained. Its just... the message is there. It is truely "The greatest fantasy epic of our time". "One of the best wonder tales ever written" by a human hand. No book I have ever read has given me more joy than "The Hobbit". "For all its fantasticality, the moral principles which govern it are uncomfortably familiar.... To sum it all up, here is a wonderful story, set in a world which paralyzes the imagination and told in magnificent prose. What more can an author give?" I hope heaven gives me the feeling this beautiful story does. It does nothing but make me happy!

What an amusing adventure to enjoy in graphic novel form. The artwork was straight out of a fairytale, colorful, and nostalgic. I quite enjoyed this read.

The Hobbit is a medieval fantasy story about a little hobbit(small Halfling) named Bilbo goes on an adventure with 13 dwarfs and the mighty wizard Gandalf. They travel through caves full of goblins, elf towns, towns of men and dark forests infested with spiders. The dwarfs are on a mission to get their home mountain filled with gold and jewels back from a greedy dragon, but they encounter many difficulties on the way slowing their long journey even more. When the finally reach the mountain the wake the dragon, who then destroys lake town, one of the archers kills the dragon. The men demand some of the dwarfs gold, they refuse and hold their ground in the mountain. the goblins had heard the death of the dragon and wanted the gold. The men, elf's and dwarfs work together to kill the goblin army. The dwarfs return to their mountain once and for all.

I rate the hobbit 5 out of 5 stars because it is very enjoyable and fun to read. The graphic novel version has very good pictures which add to the already amazing storyline. The hobbit is a book I think everyone should read and that everyone will enjoy.

3/5

Hacía mucho tiempo que no leía un cómic y qué mejor que una adaptación de El hobbit para retomar la costumbre. De todas formas, me llevé una desilusión, esperaba mucho más. Las ilustraciones no me convencieron, me parecieron un poco cutres aunque el color las animaba un poco. Y la traducción es pésima...¿desde cuándo a los orcos se les llama trasgos? Además me parece que la historia está mal organizada, le dan mucha importancia (y muchas hojas) a detalles que no aportan nada a la historia y en cambio la Batalla de los Cinco Ejércitos se desarrolla en poco más de una página. Me parece que se podría haber repartido mucho mejor, aunque fuese añadiéndole páginas. Sin embargo yo tengo una debilidad por las historias de Tolkien y solo por eso y por las ilustraciones a doble página del final (que sí que merecen la pena), le pongo un 3 a esta adaptación que sin duda prefiero leer en boca del propio Tolkien.

This book was my introduction to The Hobbit in 1990 when my father read it to me and showed me all of the beautifully drawn and colored images. It’s a great adaptation, and a wonderful way to introduce young kids to the material. Also, if you’re like me and want to dip back into the world of Tolkien without taking on the responsibility of a full book, it hits all the important beats and provides some rich illustrations that try their best to color in the difference. My only real complaint is that sometimes the narration is inconsistently written and does some weird stuff with narrative perspective, like hearing the narrator refer to himself in the third person and tell you you’re going to learn more about something in just a page or two. But that stuff is easy to get over. It has good depictions of Smaug and Gollum, I love to look of Hobbiton and the wood elves. Supposedly there is a “redux” version of this where the author went in and did some additions/changes. I wouldn’t know about those as I read the copy from 1990 that I found in our family house basement that had a broken spine from me leaning on it as a kid and staring at the images of Bilbo spiking a spider in the head and smoke rising from Smaug’s slender red nose. A quality graphic adaptation/abridging.

Please note that this review is for a graphic adaptation of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. For my review of the original book, please link here:

Jean's review

This graphic adaptation of The Hobbit was first published in 1990. The artwork is by David Wenzel, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s story was abridged and adapted by Chuck Dixon. A new edition followed, for which David Wenzel made improvements and additions to the original edition, including a completely new cover design.

Just as The Hobbit was an immediate success 80 years ago, so this adaptation has become one of the best-loved graphic novels of the last quarter of a century. It is a beautiful and worthy tribute to the classic story.

Most people know the bare outline of the tale. The main character is Bilbo Baggins, a contented home-loving hobbit, who likes the quiet life. However, against his better judgement, he is tempted by the thought of an “adventure”. His life is then turned upside down when he joins the wizard Gandalf and a group of thirteen dwarves. He is employed by them as their “burglar”, when they go on a dangerous quest to reclaim their treasure which had been stolen long ago. Bilbo becomes increasingly involved, meeting with trolls, goblins and elves, and a strange slippery, amphibious creature who calls himself “Gollum”. Using his brains, and with several opportunities for inventing devious riddles, Bilbo eventually realises that it is up to him to enable the dwarves to achieve their long dream and reclaim their homeland. Alone he must face and outwit the monster who now guards the stolen hoard of treasure. And this monster is a much-feared dragon, the most dreaded in all Middle-earth, a worm called Smaug.

There are so many fantasy elements, and such drama in this story that it is an illustrator’s dream. David Wenzel clearly has much respect for Tolkien’s story, and has hand painted his hundreds of illustrations in full colour throughout. They are beautiful and very painterly. Here is the cover illustration:



And here is a link to the page on David Wenzel’s website with seven illustrations from this book:

Link here

If you click on each of the tiny thumbnails, you will see how he uses both muted and vibrant colour, and line, to create the effects he wishes. David Wenzel credits both Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac as two of his influences, and this is quite evident in his work.

I particularly like the lush evocative illustrations of the Shire, and the atmospheric ones in the dragon’s cave. Most startling for me is the way David Wenzel has captured exactly what Bilbo looks like in my mind’s eye: a short dumpy male with a bit of a pot belly and plain, almost ugly features. He has a bulbous nose and a rubicund good-natured face. All the dwarves are well-drawn individuals and very convincing, as is Gollum, who is uncannily like the Gollum in the films. Smaug is a mean-looking and terrifying beast.

It is perhaps as well to remember that this graphic novel was created a good decade before Peter Jackson’s first film of “The Lord of the Rings” and far, far before any of his films of The Hobbit. Yet there are several similarities. Both David Wenzel and Peter Jackson incorporated J.R.R. Tolkien’s maps, calligraphy and charts, for instance, hand drawn and coloured by the author himself. It is Tolkien who is responsible for the beautiful lettering and cartographic design, not any later artist. In a similar way, David Wenzel seems to have given a nod to Tolkien’s original water colours, in his choice of illustrative techniques and palette.

The text by Chuck Dixon is also excellent and well matched. Although both David Wenzel and Chuck Dixon are American, the language used is English, and much of it is straight from Tolkien, especially the dialogue in the speech bubbles. The strip comments are long and extensive; this graphic novel takes a long time to read. Only once did I notice a mistake - and it was a humdinger! Near the beginning Gandalf says “gotten”. I can imagine the philologist and stickler for authenticity, Mr. J.R.R. Tolkien, would have blanched at that! There were a couple of instances where the American “o” instead of “ou” had crept in: for example using “vigor” instead of vigour, or “flavor” instead of flavour, but they were rare. And I particularly appreciated the precise use of punctuation, with inverted commas always correctly placed, and use being made of semi-colons.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book, as I am not the target audience for graphic novels, and consequently not very easy to please.

If you want to read a graphic adaptation of The Hobbit, then you need look no further. This is the one. It is hard to imagine how it could be bettered, within this format. And for that reason, I rate it a full five stars.

Of course I love the original The Hobbit more but I think this is a very good and loving adaption that is very true to the original. The first edition of it came 1989 so it's free from influence from the movies. Smaug is wonderful!

Reseña completa en el blog: Lengua Sucinta

قرأت الترجمة العربية للهوبيت من قبل وأحببت أن أقرأ هذه الرواية المصورة على سبيل المراجعة والاستمتاع بالرسوم.
هذه أكثر رواية مصورة أخذت مني وقتًا في قراءتها رغم معرفتي بأحداثها. وهذا لأنها ليست "رواية مصورة" بقدر ما هي "الرواية مصورة"! فالرسوم هنا لا يكاد دورها يزيد عن لعب دور الخلفية لإعادة كتابة الرواية الأصلية كاملة. خط الكتابة صغير جدا حتى تكفي الصفحات لحشر كل التفاصيل حشرًا فوق الرسوم. استمتعت للغاية بلغة "تولكين" العظيمة التي استدرجتني الرواية المصورة لتذوقها وإدمانها.

أحمد الديب
أكتوبر 2015

As much as I love The Hobbit, this is not a good version of it. I chose to read it aloud to my son, thinking that it would be a great way to introduce the classic to him, but alas. The adapters apparently are as fond of the Tolkien's masterpiece as I am, and it made them cling to every word. As a result, there are far too many words for a graphic novel, and they are far too small and difficult to read, and out of proportion with the pictures. The pictures themselves are reasonably good, though not spectacular. Overall, I expected much more from a graphic novel based on The Hobbit.