Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

For fans of the book and movie, it may well take a few pages to warm to Little’s style in this rendition of Thompson’s classic. It’s not that it’s harsh or unwelcoming—quite the opposite. Little’s last major work was a comic book version of the Powerpuff Girls—not exactly the sort of resume item that calls to mind gonzo journalism. But even in the original, Thompson-surrogate Raoul Duke is, in many senses, a cartoon, and Little has tasked himself with constructing as literal an adaptation as possible. What his visual style lacks in drug-fueled chaos, compared to the previous takes by Ralph Steadman and Terry Gilliam, it makes up in sheer expressiveness, capturing the sense of immediacy and paranoia that saturated the original’s long, bad trip. For those who already know each typed letter of the book, this is a retread, but for a new generation never exposed to the original, it’s a vivid insight into one of the most fascinatingly creative and unwaveringly troubled writers of his generation. (Nov.)