novel. Recasting the same tale as a series of four graphic novels requires that the dramatic high points fall evenly and the quarter, half, three-quarter, and end marks even to the specific page. Furthermore, since each of the graphic novels is a concatenation of six comic book issues, lesser concluding moments come in at regular and prescribed intervals, which may or may not coincide with the source material.
We had some freedom in shaping the project at the beginning, when the structure was being set. The decisions made at that juncture—how many issues of the comic book would there be, how many pages in each issue, how many issues would be gathered into each graphic novel, how many graphic novels would there be—affected every subsequent decision. A Game of Thrones could be condensed and simplified down viciously by omitting subplots, characters, and scenes, rewriting characters’ relationships and motivations. It could also be expanded out into an epic to rival the original Akira , with the art being given more territory to expand and the more visual scenes playing out over the course of pages rather than panels. Either approach could be good, but they couldn’t be equivalent, and how each of the other decisions played out would be impacted by the shape of the scaffold erected in those early meetings.
So with those specific issues as a kind of sampler, we can come back again to the central question: when adapting from prose to sequential art, what am I trying to preserve and what am I willing to sacrifice?
It would be great if all the issues militated for one answer, but in practice, any one concern can find another that seems to oppose it. If I remain faithful to the original story, I face the problem of how to preserve the exposition, the dialogue, and the age of the younger characters. If I let the original story fall by the wayside and reimagine Westeros—adding new characters and plotlines or recreating ones that already exist—I have to confront the unfinished nature of the original and the expectations from the reader based on the novel and the other adaptations.
The first extreme, and the one that is in some ways the most tempting, is to preserve not the story itself, but the sense of wonder and grandeur and scope that comes from reading A Game of Thrones for the first time. A Song of Ice and Fire has been described as an epic retelling of the War of the Roses without the burden of history. Would it really be a violation of the spirit, then, for the graphic novel version to be a retelling of A Game of Thrones without the burden of the novel? If we rebooted Westeros, took the names and general plot, but changed the details and their echoes, and let the story as told in the graphic novels become its own tale, it would also participate in a longstanding tradition inside comics. How many versions of the Batman story have been told without doing violence to the underlying creation of Bob Kane?
The other extreme approach would be to remain perfectly faithful to the original text. One editor called this the “Classics Illustrated” approach. Where there are stretches of exposition or dialogue that didn’t fit gracefully into a visual composition, put in pages of the original text, perhaps illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Risk legal action with the underage sexuality, or else replace the images with the original text and leave the rest to the audience’s imagination. In this version, the graphic novels become less of an independent project and more of a special edition of the original book. The problem of not knowing what happens in the final, unwritten volumes of the series is solved by including everything, no matter how apparently insignificant.
In practice, the course we’ll take will rest between the two options, but nearer—and I think significantly nearer—to one than the other. Charting our best course depends on what A Game of Thrones in particular and A Song of Ice and Fire in the larger
We had some freedom in shaping the project at the beginning, when the structure was being set. The decisions made at that juncture—how many issues of the comic book would there be, how many pages in each issue, how many issues would be gathered into each graphic novel, how many graphic novels would there be—affected every subsequent decision. A Game of Thrones could be condensed and simplified down viciously by omitting subplots, characters, and scenes, rewriting characters’ relationships and motivations. It could also be expanded out into an epic to rival the original Akira , with the art being given more territory to expand and the more visual scenes playing out over the course of pages rather than panels. Either approach could be good, but they couldn’t be equivalent, and how each of the other decisions played out would be impacted by the shape of the scaffold erected in those early meetings.
So with those specific issues as a kind of sampler, we can come back again to the central question: when adapting from prose to sequential art, what am I trying to preserve and what am I willing to sacrifice?
It would be great if all the issues militated for one answer, but in practice, any one concern can find another that seems to oppose it. If I remain faithful to the original story, I face the problem of how to preserve the exposition, the dialogue, and the age of the younger characters. If I let the original story fall by the wayside and reimagine Westeros—adding new characters and plotlines or recreating ones that already exist—I have to confront the unfinished nature of the original and the expectations from the reader based on the novel and the other adaptations.
The first extreme, and the one that is in some ways the most tempting, is to preserve not the story itself, but the sense of wonder and grandeur and scope that comes from reading A Game of Thrones for the first time. A Song of Ice and Fire has been described as an epic retelling of the War of the Roses without the burden of history. Would it really be a violation of the spirit, then, for the graphic novel version to be a retelling of A Game of Thrones without the burden of the novel? If we rebooted Westeros, took the names and general plot, but changed the details and their echoes, and let the story as told in the graphic novels become its own tale, it would also participate in a longstanding tradition inside comics. How many versions of the Batman story have been told without doing violence to the underlying creation of Bob Kane?
The other extreme approach would be to remain perfectly faithful to the original text. One editor called this the “Classics Illustrated” approach. Where there are stretches of exposition or dialogue that didn’t fit gracefully into a visual composition, put in pages of the original text, perhaps illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Risk legal action with the underage sexuality, or else replace the images with the original text and leave the rest to the audience’s imagination. In this version, the graphic novels become less of an independent project and more of a special edition of the original book. The problem of not knowing what happens in the final, unwritten volumes of the series is solved by including everything, no matter how apparently insignificant.
In practice, the course we’ll take will rest between the two options, but nearer—and I think significantly nearer—to one than the other. Charting our best course depends on what A Game of Thrones in particular and A Song of Ice and Fire in the larger
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