Retief!: The graphic album

by Jan Strnad, Dennis Fujitake, Keith Laumer (Creator)

Graphic album - Six Short stories. Book in Mylar cover, No remainder marks, no ink markings. NOT priced clipped. First edition, First Printing

Genres: Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, Comics

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Retief stories in comic book form. The art is classic Black & White inks. The art is some of the part of this collection. It looks to imitate old school Heavy Metal magazine with weird looking aliens and even weirder looking humans.
The stories are mostly classic 1960's sci-fi magazine fair. We have an undefeatable good looking and almost always right leading man Retief. Retief is a "diplomat" at the mercy of closed minded bureaucrats and paper pushers who send him off to fix problems by the book. Well Retief gets results, but not buy the book and some of the fun is seeing how he words his crazy ideas to fit the bureaucrats world view. By the final story though Retief's boss knows what is up and just sends the guy to get the job done, often in exasperated tones.
I really liked the alien life forms in these stories, they are often not human looking at all. The dialog at times with these other sentients is a weird read reflecting translations of language and culture that you often do not find in older science fictions.
I guess my big complatian is the human females are hardly involved in the stories or just there as objects to ogle. Some of Retief's solution to a problem happens off camera and we don't actually what he did. The comic is very wordy overly so.

[Jefferson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dennis Fujitake's artwork in this is amazing, and uniquely suited to the humorous (but not comedic) tone of the stories. However, I stopped reading after chapter 4 because the stories were so repetetive. I imagine this is an issue with the source material rather than Jan Strnad's abilities as a scripter. The lead character invariably finds himself dropped into a situation where every single person around him is painfully incompetent, and he has to save the simple, honest salt of the earth types from the greedy, corrupt government officials. Even though he's usually the only character with a moral center, the lead comes off as arrogant and self-righteous (and not very likeable) rather than heroic.

[Jim Mcclanahan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been aware of Laumer's Retief tales for some time, but never felt compelled to read any of them. I thought this would be a good way to ease into the character via a graphic. Wrong. I found it sophomoric and mostly uninteresting.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read this in the 80's it was, as a comic at the top of my must read list and I had no idea Strnad and Fujitake were adapting Laumaer's novels. I have since read the amazing prose but prefer the comics; first kiss and all that. Thanks to www.abebooks.com you can pick up this HC treasure for about five bucks.