How to Talk to Girls at Parties (edição 2007)

Absolutely love this graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story! Moon & Ba were definitely the perfect choice of illustrators, since their artistic style is anchored in reality but with serious overtones of whimsy that capture the careful balance between reality and strange happenings in this story. Gaiman’s text presents the adventure of two young boys going to a house party as being relatively straightforward - they go, they talk to girls, and the girls are weird. Obviously the story can be interpreted literally, in that the party really is full of alien tourists in the form of beautiful girls, but speaking from the perspective of a girl we are absolutely as strange as the story portrays without actually being creatures from another planet. I’ve had far stranger conversations with boys - whether that strangeness comes from a fundamental difference in how boys and girls communicate or whether I just have weird topics of conversation is a whole other matter. The art style seems to very much support this theory that our hapless narrator just doesn’t quite get girls, so he sees their conversations as being otherworldly and above his comprehension, as all of the girls look very human (even for all their beauty). And yet, the final scene, where the boys exit the party post-haste due to some kind of disagreement with Stella, brings us back to the idea that maybe these girls are not just girls - having the fires of a thousand suns in their eyes (etc) is a typical description of extreme anger, but I get the distinct impression that Stella could be much more than what she seems. Better run for your lives, boys! ( )

This was never one of my favorite Gaiman stories, so I wasn't hugely enthusiastic about a graphic novel adaptation. Well, let's just say it met my expectations. I don't understand why this is the story of his that so many people seem to love. Maybe if I had ever been an awkward teenage boy, I'd relate better? ( )

Simple, sweet and short: a story of a 15-year-old boy who reminisces 30 years later, of a party he attended with a - seemingly - more attractive friend and what happened there. From the short story:

She stood out of the way, letting us enter. “There’s a kitchen in the back,” she said. “Put it on the table there, with the other bottles.” She had golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful. The hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that she was beautiful. “What’s your name, then?” said Vic. She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his crooked white grin and told her that that had to be the prettiest name he had ever heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like he meant it. Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the kitchen, and I looked into the front room, where the music was coming from. There were people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she started to dance, swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.

This was during the early days of punk. On our own record players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the Stranglers and the Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people’s parties you’d hear ELO or 10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky. During the German exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on was Neil Young’s Harvest, and his song “Heart of Gold” had threaded through the trip like a refrain: I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . . .

The music playing in that front room wasn’t anything I recognized. It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I’d been given for my last birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had a beat, though, and the half-dozen girls in that room were moving gently to it, although I only looked at Stella. She shone. Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding a can of lager. “There’s booze back in the kitchen,” he told me. He wandered over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room for me in that conversation.

Worth the short read. It's nostalgic without being sappy. ( )

This was a fun little story. ( )

I enjoyed the story and the artwork, but wish it had been a bit longer. ( )