Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about graphic novel adaptations:

An increasing number of books seem to be newly adapted as graphic novels. How do you feel about this trend? Are you excited to see new adaptations? Do you think new audiences could discover the story? Are there some books that you think might be difficult to adapt in this way?

I’m sort of ambivalent on this topic. On the one hand, a lot of the ones I’ve read seem to either simplify the story too much or not really do a great job of adaptation. Sometimes they feel more like they’re just illustrated versions, and that’s disappointing, because the thing about graphic novels is that they’re a whole different form, and you have to tell the story in a different way. I get why they sometimes stick close to the source (like A Wizard of Earthsea‘s adaptation does), but it sometimes means they don’t really work as graphic novels.

On the other hand, I’ve been reading some great manhua and manhwa adaptations of various Chinese and Korean webnovels, like Solo Leveling, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Heaven Official’s Blessing… and I really appreciate the way the switch to a visual medium helps me understand what characters and settings look like (which I need a lot of help with, given that I’m completely aphantasic). Often I find that reading the graphic adaptations helps the details fall into place, as well.

So I definitely feel there have been bad adaptations, and ones that are not to my taste, and ones which are just cash-ins… but that doesn’t mean I won’t try more, just that I’m maybe a bit cautious about it.