Traveling Across Media: Comics and Adaptations

Introduction

Comic books and graphic novels occupy a textual position in a wider range of visually composed and visually linguistic works (Cohn, 2021). What is more, comics and graphic novels occupy a position in educational practice based on their capacity to engage readers, and to build comprehension skills through their multimodal design (Frey & Fisher, 2008).

As Burke (2012) noted, stories rarely appear in one medium in modern culture, but instead are diffused and proliferate across a diverse range of text types and media outputs. In this chapter, the author lends a particular focus on the affordance of the graphic novel as a transmedial adaptive text. That is, a text which carries across a range of media and has a flexible adaptability between and among a range of textual media. While interview data informs this conversation, the structure and nature of this chapter is more open-ended and is not presented as a formal exercise in scientific research. Rather, it is heuristic and discovery-based in its formulation as an exploration of texts and, finally, of one creator’s experience with generating adaptations across forms of media, specifically from canonical prose and play-format texts to updated graphic novel interpretations. This journey from canon to comics page is hardly new, stemming from work done in the 1940s, with a noted emergence of more experimental adaptations in the 2010s (De Dobbeleer & De Bruyn, 2013). Davis (2017) also noted a relationship between comics and film in terms of adaptations.

This chapter examines the movement back and forth between and among media, with the comics form at center and features a number of comics work examples from the author’s literacy history and current reading life. While not a formal measured inquiry into a particular method, this chapter is organized with an initial treatment of adaptation theory, as well as a consideration of research that has been done with adaptation in comics form. The author includes textual examples from the work of Ray Bradbury, Walter Dean Meyers, and others as a canonical and/or historical authors who have either worked in comics form or whose work has been transformed/adapted to the comics medium. The author considers the transmedial treatment of comics texts that have been chosen for their contribution to the overall question of how adaptation occurs across media, with particular attention to comics form.

The chapter concludes with an analytic interview form with an author/artist who engages in adaptation work before offering a set of implications for classroom consideration.