Was curious to see what McDermid could do with a graphic novel as I have liked a lot of the authors earlier works.. I quite liked the story and we did buy the book for our library.

An interesting and timely book. That builds slowly, but steadily to a bleak ending - which left me quite despondent and a bit anxious. The illustrations depict people in an un-stylised, natural way which adds credibility to the overall story.

This graphic novel was an intense read. Very much of the time, set on the verge of a pandemic, we follow journalist Zoe Meadows as she tries to track the source before the worst happens.
In the wake of Covid-19 this was a read that hit home. With a colour pallet of black and grey, a mixed media format and illustrations like those of courtroom sketches, it all came together to make this a very real event of a story. The format of the graphic novel just enhances the story, with the illustrations making it feel all the more real.
Gritty and with a female protagonist you can root for, this was a graphic novel I shall re/read, maybe when it's not so fresh in daily life.
Already got our copy at my school.

RESISTANCE: A GRAPHIC NOVEL
By Val McDermid with Illustrations by: Kathryn Briggs


“Resistance” is a graphic novel written by Val McDermid and illustrated by Kathryn Briggs,
The story was originally presented as a radio broadcast on BBC in 2017. The narrative entails
a world-wide pandemic and explores a multitude of societal ills along the way. Zoe Meadows is a journalist covering a Scottish music festival - the Summer Solstice, with the goal of interviewing several of the performers. The festival is plagued by almost constant rain (ala Woodstock) and Zoe often takes refuge in her friends Sam and Lisa Shore’s food truck - “Sam’s Sausage Sandwiches”, while darting in and out of the downpour. Some of the attendees appear stricken with a gastrointestinal disturbance, originally feared to be “food poisoning” and blamed on the food at her friend’s food truck. After the festival is over, one of performer dies from a “mysterious infection” , followed by sequentially not only attendees becoming ill, but the disease spreads initially throughout the UK and then the world. Ground Zero infection appears related to tainted sausages from a farm with suspect practices. The pathogen appears to be an elusive antibiotic-resistant strain of Erysipelas …. commonly referred to as “The Sips”
McDermid crafts a gripping and unfortunately relevant narrative that explores many present day themes: the politicization of health concerns, the ultimate effect of over-use of antibiotics,
commercial greed impacting on ethics in both pharmaceutical and food production industries, and finally inability of the worldwide healthcare system to deal with an aggressive pandemic.
Unfortunately the heady mix of themes is not complemented by the sparse comic-style graphics.
Thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for providing an Uncorrected Proof in exchange for an honest review
…. at readers remains.com …..

Zoe Beck is reporting from the end of the world as we know it. It begins at a music festival food truck and spreads - a resistant bacteria that seems intent on wiping out anything it can. Pigs, humans, dogs, etc. This is a graphic reminder of what could happen if more care is not taken in the use and abuse of antibiotics. A reminder in a time of COVID that things could be worse.

The author certainly picked the correct time to release this. A comic about a pandemic in the middle of a pandemic. This was has a different basis. It's brought on by tainted pork due to the overuse of antibiotics. That's one of my pet peeves about the book. It's almost a PSA about the overuse of antibiotics, it's mentioned so many times. The art is rough at times and there's way too much dialogue on every page. Still, it's a scary and sobering read.

There is a large festival celebration for summer solstice. Zoe Meadow, journalist is there to interview people but there are people running to the bathroom due to diarrhea. The people start to return home with blotches appearing on their skin. When many are home, they develop a fever which ends in their death. The “bug becomes a fast spreading illness that doctors can’t control so it spreads throughout the country. (It reminded me of COVID-19 pandemic.). At first, it is thought it came from the food vendors at the solstice festival or the pigs living on the farm where the celebration took place. People attack the food vendors. Zoe meets Dr. Siddiqui, an infectious disease researcher muzzled by an arrogant bureaucracy, provides Zoe with a handy “idiot’s guide” to how greedy pharmaceutical companies and antibiotic-stuffed animals helped create a killer plague. rockets the catastrophe along as the mutating and species-jumping bacterium overwhelms a medical response. Zoe has a “big” story on her hands. Will she be able to find where the source of this illness came from?

The author brings the story to life with her graphs and map illustrating the catastrophe along as the mutating and species-jumping bacterium. I liked the graphic novel but it also made me wonder if this is our future. I hope not. The illustrations work well with the story.

In short this book is about a bacteria infection that gets out of control. It's an interesting story of how the world would react. It was extreme reaction but hopefully it doesn't completely tell how humanity would back. It was an extreme response but still it was very timely read. I liked it overall on how it gives voice to how quickly society and money seems to be more important then saving lives. I enjoyed it.

Pretty gripping tale of an antibiotic resistance-driven pandemic. Not my preferred topic for last year or this year (fingers crossed for 2022) but McDermid does a great job describing the family tensions, government (poor)response, public tensions, and in some ways the utter fragility of our societal and governmental institutions. The art was pretty off putting, and there were huge info dumps of words on several pages that reduced the graphic novel at times to just an illustrated manuscript. Four stars for the story, two for the art and use of the medium.

Journalist Zoe Meadows went to a music festival in Scotland to report on it. She didn’t expect the festival to be the start of a worldwide pandemic. The first cases can be traced back to Zoe’s friend’s food truck. Since Zoe was at the site of the start of the pandemic, so she wants to investigate it herself. The world is in a race against the disease before it takes over the word.

I believe this story was originally written before the pandemic, but it is so creepy to read now. I’ve learned more about pandemics and viruses in the last year than I ever thought I would know. This story seemed much more plausible than if I had read it years ago.

The disease in this story took over in a different way than Covid-19 did in our world. It was more difficult for the medical experts to treat and figure out the disease in the story. I think we were very lucky to have a vaccine developed so quickly. The characters in the graphic novel weren’t so lucky.

I loved the art in this graphic novel. Each page was a separate piece of art. The images were coloured with shades of black, white, and gray. The backgrounds were often collages of different scenes or newspaper articles, but they related to the subject matter in the story on that particular page. This kind of patchwork art reflected the way the characters had to piece together the disease and how to fight it.

Resistance is an honest graphic novel about a global pandemic.

Thank you Grove Atlantic for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have tried to read this book several times but the art style and the layout of the graphic novel make it impossible to zoom in and still have it make sense. The art style is a pencil and looks like a rough draft - but it is the same copy on the final version. The readability is too poor for me to finish reading this book.

I am marking this as a DNF for me.

* spoiler alert ** Thanks to Net Galley.com for an advanced reading copy. Resistance is an artfully crafted, beautifully drawn graphic novel that is probably going to give me nightmares. As I write this review, reports about the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 are all over the news. But the transmissibility of a respiratory virus is nothing compared to the disastrous potential of drug resistant bacterium. Resistance explores this possibility and considers the devastating effect that kind of pandemic could have on the world. At times, the book seems didactic, but I think that we may need writers to take new approaches to encouraging scientific and medical literacy.

I was only able to open the ebook on my phone, which made it very difficult to read. While the story was somewhat interesting, the grayscale artwork did not really pull me into the story.

*****3.5 stars*****

This book is very timely. It's a cautionary tale but also one of hope.
The main character and narrator, Zoe, is a journalist. She's tired of covering celebrity news, which she switched to from "real journalism" to make more money, but which she genuinely dislikes. She's covering a music festival held during Solstice, and she's reluctant to go. Her best friends, Sam and Lisa, will be there, serving food out of their truck, Sam's Sausage Sandwiches. Zoe spends most of the rainy festival interviewing headliners and hanging out with her friends. She doesn't eat Sam's food because she's a vegetarian. The story really begins when people begin falling sick at the festival. Well, they're eating poorly, drinking a lot, hungover, not showering, and walking around in the "mud."
But it quickly becomes apparent that poor sanitation at the festival and overindulging are not the culprits. Zoe begins to dig into what's really going on and finds out more than she wants to know. Soon, it doesn't matter who knows what, thanks to "the sips," a deadly disease blowing through the population at an exponential rate.

If this sounds too familiar, that's because this graphic novel is very timely. There are major differences between the sips and COVID, the primary difference being that the sips is bacterial, not viral. Therefore, antibiotics should be able to help, but because of bacteria's resistance to our over-medication, the disease mutates quickly. Another difference is how quickly the sips passes from person to person. It's more like the plague than COVID in that regard. Also, Zoe's digging uncovers more than just people eating food they shouldn't, leading to species-jumping viruses. There's more going on than meets the eye (I was tempted to say than "meats" the eye, but this is serious), and there are major critiques of big pharma, politics, and economics in this book. Scientists are heroes, underfunded but dedicated to finding answers and making a difference with their research.

This book starts off very gripping. The tension and suspense build from page to page, especially as the perspective shifts from Zoe to her friends to politicians and scientists, notably Aasmah Siddiqui and her colleague Cheryl. There are surprising revelations and not-so-surprising but sad turns of event. Once I got to about 75% through, though, I felt like the plot moved towards an ending very quickly, and I lost a lot of the suspense and connection I felt throughout the first two-thirds or so of the book. I found that major events were spelled out pretty quickly and without much impact, and the book wraps up in a way that makes sense but that seems too easy given the circumstances. Also, a major revelation at the end that gives the characters quite a shock seems unrealistic given the amount of time over which the book seems to take place.

With all that being said, I really enjoyed this book. I found it very interesting with everything we've gone through since last year. Reading about a pandemic while living through one is hard in some ways but also oddly comforting in others. Resistance shows us that it could be much worse, and there are many things that people in power don't do in the book that they've done in life that have helped make things better than they could have been. The book also ends on a hopeful (though tragic) note, and there's a sort of gloomy optimism with it.

As for the artwork, there are a few pages that are a bit confusing, and I'm not sure how to read them (like the clock page), but overall, I found Kathryn Briggs' work very intriguing and thought-provoking. There's one image that really stuck with me, and most of them have a depth to them that tells you more about the story and the context and how we're meant to understand the characters and their roles but also what they symbolize.

Overall, I'm glad I read this book, and I recommend it if you like graphic novels, and if you feel up to reading a book about a pandemic. Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for offering a digital copy of Resistance in exchange for an honest review.

So Val McDernid has a time machine? It's real creepy reading her story about a pandemic while in the middle of one. Especially gruesome her prediction of reactions from people in power. Can only recommend!

It was interesting to see the parallels between the pandemic in the book and the one we are currently in. However, I found myself drifting away from the book quite often because each page was so dense. I wonder if this would have been better as a novel since the amount of dialogue on each page was often overwhelming. Although the artwork fit the mood of the book, it, too, was often super dense; the layering of graphics sometimes made it hard to really focus.

This graphic novel was an all too real story about what happens when politics and greed get in the way of science and public health. Although this was written before the arrival of COVID-19, I couldn’t help but notice how spot-on the author was in predicting human nature and the battle between politics and science.

In Resistance, we have a journalist named Zoe as our protagonist. She is assigned to cover a large music festival in Northumberland. It doesn’t take long for many of the festival-goers to become ill, although initially the illness appears to be a 24-hour bug. When the festival ends, everyone returns home to their respective towns. The simple little “24-hour bug” turns out to be a bacterial contagion that quickly spreads across the globe.

It’s a lot of doom and gloom but it’s also a warning to each of us to be mindful of the living conditions, breeding conditions, and overall care of the animals providing our meat source. In addition, it’s a wake-up call about our overuse of antibiotics.

I enjoyed the illustrations and the story flowed seamlessly. Really well done.

This was a graphic novel I didn’t want to put down until I finished it. The timeliness of the plot combined with the illustrations made this a *5 star* book for me.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a copy to read and review.

By the time the politicians started listing to what the scientists were saying, the damage was done.

What’s amazing about this cautionary tale eerily penned before the COVID-19 global pandemic is its spot-on predictions surrounding human nature and the effects that such an event has on humanity. The graphic novel’s lead protagonist is a journalist, Zoe, who covers a large, international Woodstock-like event on a rural farm in Northumberland. Almost immediately, a large number of people become ill and you can guess - return to their homes (local and abroad), families, jobs and in the case of the performers - off to their next booking (local and abroad) innocently spreading the contagion.

Art then imitates life when familiar themes emerged in the book:

- The politicization of Health Care
- Refusal to warn the public or share facts to avoid “causing a panic,” or because there was no immediate cure or effective treatment
- The demand of some for the “Freedom of Movement” when quarantine and social distancing is needed and recommended
- Big Pharma and Corporate greed ignoring the scientific warning of anti-microbial resistance in animals and humans
- Misreporting/Minimizing/Lying about the number of infections and deaths to undermine the scientists and medical professional’s warnings, skew statistics, and trend analysis.
- Ignoring the effects of cross-species contamination and doing nothing to prevent it

Not only does the author nailed much of what we witnessed during 2020, she seemingly presented facts that should not be ignored -- the reader is left with a lot to digest.

I received a free early access copy of Resistance: A Graphic Novel by Val McDermid through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for this opportunity.

Resistance is a grayscale comic with okay but not great artwork. Grayscale comics can work but the art is too flat in values and pages uninteresting in layout. The story is slow and rather uninteresting. It’s not a page turner by any stretch. I went in with interest but the combination of story and art just doesn’t work. Maybe it’s just hit at the wrong time after the horrific virus and death toll recently.

Resistance is a nearly prophetic graphic novel about a pandemic (written in 2017 as a radio drama), by Val McDermid. I don’t normally read graphic novels, so I’m generally unfamiliar with the format but I jumped at the chance to read this since Val McDermid is one of my favorite authors (You may know her from her two mystery series featuring Karen Pirie and Carol Jordan & Tony Hill. If not, you should definitely check them out.) As someone unfamiliar with the graphic novel format, I had an expectation of more color illustrations, scenery, and detailed backgrounds, but the book was done only in black, white and grays, and the majority of the pictures were close people’s faces as they spoke to each other. Though the artwork felt very monotonous after a while, I did enjoy the story, which in many ways parallels our current situation with Covid-19. I’m not sure if it’s my appreciation for the author’s stories, or my unawareness for the genre , but I think I would have enjoyed this as a traditional novel rather than a graphic novel.