The fact that it stops halfway through the narrative for no apparent reason, coupled with repeated artwork and little variation in the panels featured leaves the book with an overall feel of a project where few people seemed too bothered. Whilst I would have liked to have read a complete story this first volume kind of lets me down. The fact that the book ends with the murder of Kyle but no resolution as to what happens to his killer definitely seems like an engineered hook, something to frustrate readers and have them wanting to find out what happens next. The decision to split the story into two volumes doesn't seem to have been made because the events are so long that it would make a book too large to read in a single volume, and it strikes me that the choice was made by the publisher in order to try and sell a second book. The book itself is only 80 pages long, so it's a very short read. The book ends with the dramatic murder of Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield, leaving readers wondering what happens next in the story. The biggest issue I had with the book, however, was the choice to split it into two volumes. Whilst I understand that reusing artwork can save time and effort, it began to feel like it was laziness, and every time that I noticed it it would pull me out of the book. ![]() Once it became apparent here, there were other times that I began to notice a repetition of the images, where it looked like the artist had reused old panels without any variation. No variation in expression or pose was used a lot of the time, and it felt like the artist, Bruno, had simply copy/pasted the images. ![]() This wasn't bad in itself, but it quickly became clear that each panel was exactly the same. The scene consisted of switching between a close-up of the characters faces when each of them were talking. There's a section of the book with quite a long interview between Chris Kyle and Bill O'Reilly where the two of them talk about American Sniper and Chris' time in combat. These moments tended to be in the interview segments of the book. Whilst this didn't bother me most of the time as this seemed to have been a deliberate choice to allow readers to focus on the story over the art, there were times where it really jumped out at me. Characters were often quite flat looking, and seemed to be basic approximations and caricatures rather than detailed drawings of real people, and backgrounds were hardly ever used instead having blank, single colour panels behind people's heads. The art style of the book was incredibly simple and lacked any real depth of flare. One of the things that let this down a little, personally, was the art. ![]() It's not hard to see how this would play out transplanted to a televised documentary, and I think that was the intention of writer Fabien Nury. This feeling of reading a documentary was further built upon when the book included pieces of interviews that Chris had attended to promote his book, small images of events that would have been recorded on camera, and even advertisements for different services and events. The book is full of detached narration, with some third person telling the reader the story of Chris, rather than it being told from the point of view of anyone present in the narrative. Instead, the book focuses on the events leading directly up to his murder, and does so in a way that feels more like a documentary than a normal graphic novel. The book skips over much of Chris' early life, as well as his military career, instead jumping into the narrative following his return from duty at the point in which he found fame. As such, I went into this book with little information to colour my opinion of him, or with ideas about what to expect. ![]() I was aware of Chris Kyle in the absolute broadest sense when I first picked up this book, I knew that the man behind American Sniper was a real person, and that he was once a soldier but that was all I knew. The Man Who Shot Chris Kyle is a new graphic novel that takes the real life story of Chris Kyle, the man behind the book an film American Sniper and focuses on the events around his death.
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