Abstract

Expanding on the relationship between word and image that already exists in the illustrated novel versions of The Graveyard Book (2008), P. Craig Russell spearheaded the project to adapt Neil Gaiman’s novel as a graphic novel, published in two volumes in 2014. A different artist or team of artists adapted each individual chapter, forming a total of eight distinct visual approaches to Gaiman’s source text. Critic Linda Hutcheon’s approach to adaptation is particularly useful when thinking about the illustrations that Dave McKean and Chris Riddell first produced for Gaiman’s novel, as well as the eight distinct visual adaptations that make up the graphic novel version of the text. Hutcheon reminds her readers that, thanks to the complexities of new media and the new platforms on which stories are now available, adaptation is always a collective process. These ten distinct visual approaches showcase the partnership between and among adaptors of Gaiman’s novel. All of these illustrated versions of The Graveyard Book point to the creators’ specific visual responses to Gaiman’s novel, individual aesthetic responses that also expand and broaden the audience base for The Graveyard Book. In turn, fans, readers and viewers can receive these illustrated versions of the same novel as palimpsests of one another that balance the concept of “repetition with variation” that is so central to the process and product of adaptation.

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