Resistance by Val McDermid was a hard read, for a debut graphic novel from this author it was a bit of a challenge to read. The format for this graphic novel is very text heavy, while the illustrations are all black and white. I got to give the author credit for attempting this style, but unfortunately it fell a little short for the mark. Due to the heavy text and the black and white style, I found this to be very confusing and hard to read.

The subject material hits a bit too close to home, especially while the world is still reeling from the effects of 2020, a story about a pandemic that is killing millions of people worldwide is a bit hard to stomach. And I found the characters lacking, mostly in their reactions to the events happening in their world. Nothing seemed genuine, it all seemed like it was written to shock the reader.

I really wanted to like this graphic novel, but for me I did not enjoy this story. This gets a 2.5 stars out of 5 for me.

I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm not a graphic book reader. I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not an animal rights activist. I do work in the food industry, close to food safety issues including viruses that are killed by cooking and how to undertake HACCP evaluations of a kitchen so that uncooked product does not contaminate cooked product. All in all I really should not be reading this book which is about a virus that is introduced through a food truck selling properly cooked sausage.

I liked the grey and grey color scheme. I ignored the drawings to read the text and it took me only a few pages to get the hang of the layout so reading went smoothly. An earlier reviewer complained that pdf pages loaded slowly. I don't know why, I had no trouble and just scrolled smoothly down through. I got bored with a story I could not take seriously and didn't finish.

I asked for this book because it was Val McDermid. Let's go back to mysteries.

2,5 ⭐️

Had this graphic novel come out before 2020 I’m sure we all would have thought that it would not be possible for the story depicted here to happen in real life, but guess what? It can and it (almost) did.

While the story was interesting enough and showed tremendous research, I don’t think it’s the right time for it. Reading about a pandemic killing millions of people while we’re still immersed in a pandemic that’s killing millions of people?

This is the author’s first graphic novel and it’s a bit text heavy. The black and white art made it sometimes a bit difficult to read, especially when the text was over a very busy background.

Quick read with an story that a year ago would have been enjoyed for what it was, a work of fiction, but nowadays it’s too close to home. In three words: WAY TOO SOON!

Thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

A very timely look at Pandemics and how governments/society deals with it. It is a ark look but one that needs to be told. Good story and Interesting characters.

Do you want to relive last year? If so, then look no further. Change a deadly virus for a deadly bacteria resistant to antibiotics and this is the graphic novel for you. This is Val McDermid’s graphic novel debut and, though a good effort, I don’t think this was the right format for this story. It is really text heavy and the monochromatic illustrations and weird layout of some pages and panels make it sometimes confusing and difficult to follow. Though the story itself is good I can’t say I enjoyed my time reading this.

Grim look at an approaching public health crisis

I thought this graphic novel did an excellent job of framing the issue of rapidly-growing antibiotic resistance. The story isn’t an analogy for the COVID-19 pandemic; the antibiotic resistance pandemic is a separate threat. The graphic novel did a good job of illustrating the work of epidemiology and infectious diseases, in very plain language, The only downside was the flow on certain panels/pages. Kudos to Kathryn Briggs for the great art. Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the advance reader copy.

McDermid has created a very realistic story about a terrifying illness that is resistant to treatment. As it rapidly spreads people react in expected ways, fearful people act out in anger and violence, big pharma delays finding a cure while worrying about their bottom line, and a very few that try to help by sharing information and working on a cure. All too little, too late for society.

This graphic novel is text heavy, but very well written. The artwork is not really to my liking and the lack of color seems the wrong choice for this. I really would have liked to at least see some color when talking about the purple rash. Considering the subject matter maybe full color was considered too graphic in the end.

Overall, an intriguing story with a dark ending that will stick with readers.

Recommended for: medical thriller readers, graphic novel enthusiasts

Content warning: epidemic/pandemic story, mass death, violence

I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Val McDermid is an author renowned for her crime and thriller creations, but this is the first time she has adapted these skills to the graphic novel format. Her words, along with Kathryn Briggs' illustrations, reveal a harrowing story whose terror only becomes more pronounced when read during the current pandemic.

Zoe Meadows is a journalist tasked with covering an outdoor Scottish music festival. She is reluctant to encounter both the celebrities and the mud that will greet her there, but takes comfort in knowing that at least two friends will be among the crowd.

These friends are Lisa and Sam, who own and run a food truck appearing at the festival to fuel those attending for all-day and late-night partying. They are overrun with hungry individuals but the hype soon dies off as, well, the party-goers begin to die off, too.

What begins as a seemingly simple case of food poisoning is soon revealed to be something so much worse. And humans seem unable to stop its spread, even after they figure out its true cause.

Despite the obvious differences in what features here and the current spread of COVID-19, this had very similar and startling similarities to what we are all currently living through, across the globe. I found this a bleak and harrowing story-line, with the reality of what was depicted ensuring it struck a more chilling chord. How the bacterial infection was initial brushed off as nothing of concern and the later fear when it proved to be just the opposite was hard to read, because of this.

I didn't gel with the illustration style as wholly as I did the written narrative, however. The grey pencil drawings were simple yet well-done, but they didn't add much to my understanding or evoke emotion surrounding the events unravelling, for me.

Wow. What a fascinating story and how timely. Val McDermid is a great storyteller, and she's chosen the graphic novel format to tell her next great story. A blogger is in at the biggest story of her career, a virus that spreads from pigs to humans. It's the north of England in the current day, and a pig-raising company keeps their pigs in terrible, unhygienic conditions.

A virus native to the pigs mutates in these conditions and jumps to human, and causes the kind of illness we have seen with the coronavirus. The only difference? Much greater level of fatality, equivalent to that of the Black Death.

The artist isn't quite at McDermid's level-- the panels are interesting and well-composed but sometimes the lack of detail in the images -- all the protagonists are blurry, for example -- leads to a lack of appreciation that detracts from the story.

The plot sounds interesting, but I found the graphic novel format difficult to read as an e-book, so I did not finish it.
Val McDermid is a great author so I will give this 3 stars in the expectation that it is a good read in hard copy format.

Thanks to NetGallery for providing this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

Holy crap! This look down an all too possible timeline is completely mesmerizing and completely terrifying. All of Val's journalistic and storytelling skills are on display, and the story adapts well from her BBC radio script. Kathryn Briggs art is the perfect complement to the story, adding a sense of history & mythology to the meta-fictional in the age of the pandemic tale.

Resistance
by Val McDermid and Kathryn Briggs
Imprint:Black Cat
Page Count: 160
Publication Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 13978–0–8021–5872–7
Dimensions: 6.70"” x 9.45"
US List Price: $17.00
**This is an ARC provided by NetGalley for book reviews.**

Overview

The Scottish crime author Val McDermid and artist Kathryn Briggs have collaborated on a graphic novel called Resistance which fictionalizes a deadly outbreak of an infectious disease caused by a microbe which acquires antibiotic-resistance eventually wiping most of the earth’s population. A three-part BBC radio drama called Resistance about the story was aired in 2017. McDermid was a part of a workshop on anti-microbial resistance by the Wellcome Trust. Resistance as a graphic novel is a product of that workshop attended by scientists, authors, and professionals alike.

Detail Review

My first experience with McDermid’s nonfictional work was her extensively researched book Forensics-The Anatomy of Crime. She used interviews with several forensic professionals and scientists along with her own long experience to create a vivid world of unlocking mysteries hidden in crime scenes. She is no stranger to weaving scientific breakthroughs in her fictional works.

The graphic novel’s premise will be very familiar to us who survived 2020. The story begins with a journalist Zoe who goes to a music festival to interview upcoming musicians and new-generation artists. Sounds a bit like Glastonbury Festival alright with some 150,000 attendees attending the festival under open skies, battling heavy rain showers, muddy terrain, and queuing up for quick breaks at food trucks.

As the festival winds up a famous celebrity musician falls sick with food poisoning symptoms. The festival manager doesn’t seem bothered as many other people start showing similar symptoms. Eventually, the visitors pack up and go home. The people who fell sick at the festival get better eventually. But within a few days, people start observing strange purple skin lesions on their bodies. The doctors are clueless and they refuse to create a panic since the lesions do not seem to harm anyone. Meanwhile, food truck owner and Zoe’s friend Sam who attended the festival suspects a batch of meat he obtained from a nearby farm to be dodgy. He asks Zoe to dig around since people started getting sick with food poison at the festival. As time passes, more people turn up sick in hospitals. People converged to blame Sam’s sausage sandwiches as the culprit. Few musicians die and the infection seems to have spread outside Newcastle and spreading fast across England. Sounds familiar? Yes, and scarier.

The doctors and scientists are baffled alike since no medicines seem to work and people are dying. Eventually, the microbe is identified as a bacterium which has become antibiotic-resistance to all known medicines and hence patients go untreated. Zoe faces a crucial dilemma in front of her. Does she stay home to save her family from any possible infection or does she look for clues to find out the real starting point for the infection? Reminds us of the dilemma of our healthcare workers and frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic who fought every day to save lives despite knowing the fact that their jobs might endanger them or their families.

The story is brutally honest about the caustic treatment of scientists and scientific institutions by the government and private pharmaceutical companies. I was secretly proud of the way the script showed the farce that the administrative bodies are regarding healthcare policies and their ridiculous ignorance of financially supporting time-pressing research projects. The book is strewn with the intelligent portrayal of the resistance the scientists face while securing funding for their research while the big pharma ingests a massive amount of money for profitable drugs leaving none for altruistic and futuristic research.

A full-fledged pandemic led to mass mortality, disruption of civilized societal order in rural and semi-rural areas, mass paranoia, violence, crimes, migration, power outages, and finally the dissolution of governments. A group of scientists along with our protagonist survive due to their innate immunity ensconced in a remote area trying to connect to other people on other continents. Eventually, we find that most of the earth’s population is gone. Such is the price we paid for the incessant and blind usage of antibiotics which helped a tiny microbe to attain resistance to every known drug in the world.

Few facts mentioned in the book caught my eye and I found the relevant research attached to them. As a scientist, it is a humble duty to help my readers understand the best parts of a book such as this and the groups that painstakingly conduct experiments to give us an insight into crucial problems our planet faces. For example, a study published in GigaScience in 2020 did a metagenomic sample study from TARA Oceans project to quantify the antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and denote their abundance and distribution pattern. They found resistance to 26 classes of antibiotics. This is a result of decades of antibiotic-containing wastewater disposal in our oceans without any oversight or intervention. The book gives much to ponder about the impact of anthropocentric activities in creating havoc in the balance of the ecosystems, a result of which we are currently facing in the form of a highly infectious virus.

The artwork in the novel has a blend of the classic Art Nouveau style in some important moments in the story. There are illustrations which act as visual metaphors for themes like mortality and death. The pain and guilt of survivors who lost their loved ones to the disease are carved through a spiritual depiction of our existential dread. A visual narrative such as this which depicts the impact of science on the society is always more impactful than any academic text and the graphic novel is successful in achieving that aim.

Very topical subject of a food virus going rampant because of bad animal husbandry. The pencil illustrations are very realistic and give an almost para-legal feel to the comic. It's dark and serious, a little slow for me and sadly it got very tedious to read digitally. The kindle edition was dreadful, all the pages muddled up making it impossible to read, and the pdf format was so heavy the pages loaded awfully slowly and you had to wait between each half page. I did not enjoy going through it at all and it greatly taints my vision of the book. I cannot recommend the digital edition.

In Val McDermid's debut graphic novel, Resistance, we get a vision of how much worse we could have it right now, and a warning of the fresh horror we might have to look forward to, especially if things continue as they are now.

It's a tale of a pandemic quickly sweeping across the globe in what is most likely bad luck on the part of the creators. It now seems like something of another era, though there are perhaps still helpful insights for our current circumstances.

I really enjoyed the book. It's a gripping story with deftly handled character work. I felt the pain of their loss as they see the world collapse around then.

It's a brilliant peace of art from Kathryn Briggs, visually striking and laid out in creative ways. Entirely in black and white, the story is presented inventively, with imagery which imagery which evokes other times, such as the era of the black death or a Shakespeare play.

Occasionally a page is overlaid with another text, such as an advert for a Buffalo Bill show. I'm not sure what effect this achieves, but it's certainly intriguing.

Resistance has me hoping that McDermid returns to the medium and hopefully soon!

An impressive graphic novel from current queen of the crime novels. This is not a mystery, but a story about a lethal pandemic (different from the one we have now, and way more scary, if you can believe it). The story includes both the scientific side of the pandemic, and the human side, showing how society falls apart like a house of cards.

The art by Kathryn Briggs is quite good mostly. While I would prefer a more realistic style, it suits the story, and the layout of some pages is very impressive (it would be interesting to know, did the writer have a say in this, or is the artist responcible for it.

Overall, I was really impressed by this timely and impressive work

Val McDermid has won a lot of attention and acclaim as an author of crime and mystery fiction, and as a librarian whose patrons have a strong interest in the harder-hitting stuff, the news that she was coming out with a graphic adaptation caught my eye. McDermid’s work also has my attention, as she’s a prominent Scottish radical feminist (and out lesbian) whose Twitter shows that she’s actually in favor of transgender rights, making her an unfortunate rarity among feminist authors from the UK in these recent years. So, I approached this work with high hopes and an open heart.

And then the first two pages dashed that all to hell.

It’s not that artist Kathryn Briggs is without talent. Her personal website shows off a brilliant portfolio, with a style that I’d certainly give attention elsewhere. I think she’d make a marvelous cover artist.

But right from the start, it’s evident that she doesn’t have a sense of page and panel layout. Scenes that would be best executed as single panels are split in two with the gutter obscuring parts of characters’ faces, line tangents direct the eye nowhere or run into each other. Pages are laid out with artful panel divisions that draw one’s attention to specific elements, but the elements are not the actual focus of the panels, and in many places the symmetry of panels and captions or dialogue is completely unbalanced.

Moreover, the work suffers greatly from its monochrome format. Foremost, this is a story about disease, and we are told that characters are ashen grey with illness, that there are strange purple blotches that are vital plot elements —but none of this comes through clearly, because the pages are black and white with limited shading.

And that shading is hampered heavily by the additional design choices Briggs has made. Perhaps to bolster the colorless pages, the entire book is layered over a watercolor-esque backdrop. But this distracts from the actual shading in the panels, and confuses the eye. Important scenes are made blurry and indistinct.

Even more unsettling is the frequent use of public domain images as background elements on the panel, the content of the panels themselves, or in a few cases, dominating the page entirely. One particularly egregious page is superimposed with the image of the Seven of Swords (not from the tarot, but in the style of Spanish playing cards), which makes absolutely no sense in symbolic terms. It’s followed by an even more jarring page of three double-bordered panels set vertically down the center of the page, where the characters are cut off in ways that make their actions ambiguous; the upper two panels are bordered by stereotypical anime-styled nurses and doctors. It’s a disruptive contrast with Briggs’s more western style, and the asymmetry overall creates an unbalanced page that draws the eye away from the dialogue and character actions and leaves it unfocused.

McDermid is a talented writer whose social media suggests is making an effort to make up for earlier poor portrayals of transgender women in her work, so I’m willing to give her a chance in many respects. But her work suffers greatly when paired with Briggs, and none of the charm of Briggs’s own portfolio comes across on the page.

Ultimately, what should be a topical work about the response to a pandemic is hampered by an incompatible pairing of author and artist.

And we’re going to see more and more of this, I’m sure: adult OGNs are the Hot New Thing in publishing right now, and everyone is scrambling to print properties they think will grab the readers’ wallets. But maybe I’m being pessimistic. and this is just one stumble among many successes to come.

Either way, I don’t recommend it. Pick up some of McDermid’s prose fiction if you want a solid story from her.

Such a cool addition to the Val Mcdermid universe. I’m typically not into graphic novels but this was cool. I’d definitely recommend.

This book would have worked either as a grpahic novel or as a short story. It was very well timed for arc readers and very close to home with the current climate in the world. I found that it made me realise even more so how quickly epidemics spread and how quickly things can become affected. This includes even things like internet, transportation and food control. I didnt like the ending to the story and am very happy that this is not how governments over the world are dealing with the current climate.

At first I didnt like the art style of this graphic novel, however with time I got used to it.

I have been an admirer of Val McDermid for a long time. Her novels epitomize great writing: perplexing mysteries, wonderful character development, and fine writing. Although I don't read many graphic novels I approached this one with great interest. Instead, I was greatly disappointed. I have been to the Wellcome library and exhibitions several time and as a former academic librarian have been a fan of the Wellcome Trust's early adoption of its open access policy. All this is to say that I approached Resistance with high expectations. Regrettably, my hopes were dashed early on when it became clear that the book presents us with a story outline more than a fully developed story. Its story lines and its real advocate purposes are evident from the start. Perhaps readers who have "lived under a rock" in this century will be unfamiliar with such important issues as bacterial resistance to antibiotics, zoonotic disease transmission, the "moral imperatives" of vegetarianism, governmental weaknesses, pandemics, and other related challenges that scientists, public officials, and all of us have been struggling to overcome. Resistance is peculiarly resistant to human emotion. Aside from a few symbols of grief, the reader does not experience illness and death along with the main characters. I know so little about the art of providing the graphics for graphic novels that I feel inadequate to comment beyond saying that I appreciated being able to actually read the words on each page, something I have not always been able to do in some graphic novels. Overall, Resistance was a big disappointment to me and I cannot recommend it.

I came to this knowing nothing, yet expecting something with a bit of prestige – that author's name is more than a bit of a standout, obviously. So I didn't know it was presented in association with the medically-minded people at Wellcome, or anything else other than the offering publisher's name. What we have is a journalist leaving her husband and two kids to go to the local music festival – Northumberland's Glastonbury, but with dry-stone walls. She uses all the hospitality she can get to interview as many stars as she can, money being a bit tight – but uses as a base the burger van of her sausage-making bezzies. But soon something is causing no end of up-chucking, all across the festival site – is it the sausages, or the rain, or a combination of both? And will her being vegetarian help our heroine, or is there something else at play?

So, do we get anything prestige? Well, the design, for sure. The artwork is definitely not black and white, for it can only be called grey and grey. The visuals come with no end of different frames (evidently borrowing from period designs in Wellcome medical archives) - even images that don't have any need to be split up by guttering gets it, and no two pages are anything alike. Also, we get semi-diegetic backgrounds, such as mocked-up bills when someone talks of their order book, the panels getting broken up by areas of a medical research data table, and so on. Sometimes the speech is accompanied by montages of newspaper scraps. Sometimes it looks like a creation has been superimposed (or even sub-imposed, like a palimpsest) on to the page, and it feels like reading through the waxed pages those vintage books used to have next to photographic plates, or watching a stage play lit by a slide projector.

But I still didn't exactly appreciate this. It felt desperately over-designed. And perhaps done as a response, not to the demand for something higher-brow than the usual comic, but to the fact the script was rather on the boring side. The piece has a novelistic build-up, with several pages before anything completely key happens, and before the reality of the narrative is revealed. And unfortunately the reality is that this is not a narrative. It's a harangue, a propaganda piece. As our journalist gets to freely investigate the truth, and her friends, she loses all freedom and becomes a mouthpiece for a vegetarian, animal husbandry tirade with alleged intentions of drama, while the whistle-blowing aspect becomes a whistle-blodging, coming out with none of the force, concentration and accuracy you need to actually succeed in blowing anything.

Yes, 2020 gave this book's escalation of medical problems all the confirmation of its accuracy it could have needed. But this was not enjoyable. I'll like as not have forgotten it before tomorrow morning's Full English, and I cannot recommend this title.