SLJTeen Talks to Gareth Hinds

Brigid Alverson -- School Library Journal, 01/20/2010

Gareth Hinds creates graphic novel versions of the classics, staying faithful to the original text but using art to illuminate the story and make it more accessible to the reader—a more sophisticated approach than the standard Classics Illustrated treatment. A graduate of the Parsons School of Design, Hinds also creates art for video games and is currently working on a graphic novel based on The Odyssey. (photo right: Scott Pierre)

Why’d you decide to create graphic novel versions of classics? Why not write your own stories?

My basic goal is to make the best possible graphic novels I can and, by and large, I think I’m better at drawing than at writing original material. So, when I began doing graphic novels I decided I would work with the greatest literature ever written and focus my efforts on retelling and drawing those stories as well as I possibly could.

What’s the biggest challenge of doing that?

One challenge is simply the length. It’s necessary to abridge the text, carefully removing repetition and narration that can be told in pictures, and cutting the dialog down into chunks that will fit into panels. Even abridged, a graphic novel involves a huge amount of illustration.

Then there are the problems of translating from one medium to another. Each medium has its own strengths and limitations, and sometimes a very powerful, important scene is hard to translate with its full power intact. For example, when Odysseus’s aging dog Argos dies, that’s an extremely emotional moment. But showing clearly, in pictures, that he dies after he sees Odysseus turns out to be quite difficult without using a cartoony device (like Xs for eyes, or a skull) or using third-person narration. I find third-person narration unsatisfactory in a serious graphic novel and therefore avoid it, so it becomes quite a challenge to convey scenes like that in pictures.

Are there some stories that won’t work as graphic novels?

There are stories that don’t lend themselves quite as well to the graphic novel medium, but there are no stories that can’t be done. I’ve put off doing certain books because they were just too huge—War and Peace, for example, is not only incredibly long, it covers a very long period of time, includes a lot of characters, and would require a tremendous amount of historical research. I may adapt War and Peace someday, but not in 2010!

I’ve never hit an actual dead-end once I started working on a book, but occasionally difficult scenes can bog me down, and I have to walk away from them and work on something else for a while. For example, the very end of The Odyssey is rather abrupt in the original. I wanted to somehow slow down the last few pages and tie up some of the themes and plot threads, but I didn’t want to add any new material or change the story. That took a while to figure out.

In your adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, the characters are wearing modern clothes, but there aren’t any cars or cell phones.

The Venice you see in the scenery of the book is the Venice of today. I went there to draw all of the backgrounds on location, in fact. The city is still filled with historic buildings that make it seem like the “old world” and the fact that there are no cars there (or roads for them to drive on!) adds to that feeling. But it’s very much a modern city, and, yes, people living there do certainly carry cell phones. Because great stories don’t age, though, I didn’t want to be that specific about the time period. It could be set 30 years ago, or it could be tomorrow.

What’s special about your version of The Odyssey?

For one thing, at 256 pages it’s a lot longer than anything else I’ve done, or most graphic novels for that matter. It has a more expansive, epic feeling than my other books, with a lot of landscape, open ocean, and crowd scenes. What I think distinguishes my books from other graphic novel adaptations is the way I approach the classics. It’s very important to me that my adaptations do justice to the originals, and to me that doesn’t just mean not changing the story too much, it also means bringing a high level of art, craft, and sophistication to the way the story is told in the new medium—like the original author did. That’s a tall order, of course. I don’t think it’s enough to give a classic story the gloss of a modern comic or dress it up with special effects. To whatever extent my adaptations succeed, it’s because I have equal dedication to the source material, the craft of telling a story in pictures, and the creation of a beautiful book.