Same vineyard, different grapes
I get asked a lot about the adaptation process from/to video games, movies, and graphic novels, so I was interested to read writer Craig McDonald’s thoughts on the subject over on the First Second blog:
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. Speaking as a writer, I’ll grudgingly confess there’s too often some piercing truth to that cliché.
The novel and the graphic novel are very different beasts.
The great danger in adapting a novel into a graphic format is ending up with a sea of word-balloon bracketed talking heads, yammering on. So you’re always looking for ways to change the camera angle, so to speak. You look for new ways to shorthand matters through visual means. All that prose you spent all that time polishing and honing goes straight out the window.
This page from Kevin Singles’ graphic-novel adaptation of Chris’s prose novel Head Games says it all.
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I think adaptations should be abstained from on all fronts. Every story-telling format is a quite different beast from the next. The only 2 formats which are similar are that of comic (‘graphic novel’ is unnecessarily pretentious) and films. However, a film adaptation of a comic could easily even then be butchered because of acting, pacing/time constraints, music, etc…