una tigre

So, I see that Patri­cia Brigg’s new graphic novel, Home­com­ing, has been doing well on the NYT bestseller’s list. Glad to see she has an audi­ence there. As for me, I have no inten­tions of buy­ing it. No offense. I just think there is a loss of crossover appeal there (for me) as the char­ac­ters are 1) not new and 2) the artist is try­ing to com­pete with my image of these char­ac­ters and that will never do.

I ran across this round table dis­cus­sion at the Graphic Novel Reporter where they dis­cuss Adapt­ing Prose to Comics. There’s even some tid­bit info about Diana Gabaldon’s script­ing new graphic novel, that, get this, is told from Jamie’s point of view from the Out­lander series! But to highlight,

Betsy: Due to the costs involved in hir­ing so many con­trib­u­tors to the job—pencilers, inkers, scripters, let­ter­ers, col­orists if the work is in four-color—economics demand that authors who have a large and loyal fan fol­low­ing are the best choice for adap­ta­tion. Titles with a strong dose of the fan­tas­tic seem to have been the most suc­cess­ful so far: Lau­rell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series have done very well.

Well.

Bot­tom line, I’m not all that enthu­si­as­tic about this new or not so new trend of adapt­ing pop­u­lar fic­tion works into graphic nov­els or comic books. I believe that not every work will trans­late well in this for­mat. I don’t need a visual hook and I’m not enticed by the seem­ingly new story seen from a dif­fer­ent pov. Just not for me, I’m afraid. Not unless I’ve had a mind sweep where my mem­ory is wiped clean of all prior knowl­edge of char­ac­ters and char­ac­ter history.

Enough about what I think. What do you, the reader, think about this? Is there some­thing new and dif­fer­ent and fresh being added when pop­u­lar fic­tion gets adapted as a comic book?

Photo Credit: sour­mash