I’d never heard of Campfire before The Land That Time Forgot and I doubt I’ll hear much about them after I read the sequel. They’re an Indian company who publishes for kids. Land has a nice place for you to put your name in the front cover and the back has an advertisement for other Campfire comics, all adaptations of public domain literature.

As an adaptation, Land is pretty faithful. There are some strange developments–there’s some seriously implied premarital sex in here, which wasn’t in the novel–and there’s some definite lifting from the movie adaptation. I presume they figure no one will notice.

It’s difficult to gauge Scott Alexander Young’s writing abilities, as most of the comic is a directly taken from the novel, whether narrative exposition or dialogue. The original dialogue, however, is pretty lame. The worst kind of declarative statements. I’m not even getting into the frequent typos.

The art’s similarly amateurish. K.L. Jones has a reasonable understanding of composition (some of the page layouts are nice), but his figures are problematic. They lack any dynamism and so the whole comic is static. It looks like an illustrated children’s book, by an unaccomplished illustrator.

Unfortunately, Young doesn’t come up with anything to improve on the novel’s problems (it’s front-loaded, then all summary in the second half). In fact, he relies on journal entries to hurry things along.

It’s not disappointing because I had zero hopes. It’s just too bad no one serious adapts the novel.