I hope you get your hands on a copy of the graphic novel soon, as I'm curious about your thoughts.
I did finally get ahold of it!
My thoughts: first and foremost, it’s baller as hell the thing even exists. I love that graphic novels are getting more respect, and I love that Animorphs is getting more adaptations.
My nitpick: That my prediction from an earlier post was right, and it’s a little too faithful to the original novel.
I know that “too faithful to canon” is a hell of a fuddy-duddy complaint, especially for a canon-worshipper like me. But honestly, I think there are strengths to graphic novels as a medium, and that I wish this graphic novel had tapped more of them.
The second thing you learn in writing class after “Show, don’t tell” is that every medium has different options for what it can show and what it can tell. Comics can show us what characters are wearing; novels have to tell us. Novels can show us that a character’s heart is racing; comics have to tell us. And by sticking super-close to the original novel, the comic of The Invasion ends up telling us a bunch of things it should show instead.
For instance, the scene in #1 with Marco and Jake in the tiger enclosure. In the original book, Jake feels faint unease that the security guards didn’t follow them into this unknown pit area, then crouches down to get out of sight and:
My butt touched something warm.
I had a terrible feeling right at that moment. I looked up and saw Marco. Normally, Marco has kind of a dark, tanned face. But his face was white. And his eyes were very large.
"Marco," I said, very slowly and very quietly, "is there something behind me?"
"Um . . . Jake? It's a tiger."
This moment is tense because of the controlled way the information is revealed to us. Jake only knows he’s found the “something warm” that inhabits this enclosure. Then he knows that the “something warm” is enough to scare the hell out of Marco. Finally he gets Marco to break the news to him: it’s big, it’s deadly, it’s territorial, it’s not nearly as laissez-faire as that nice gorilla they just met. In short, he’s fucked if he can’t start acquiring it fast enough. The moment is scary, but also funny in that semi-hysterical way Animorphs does so well, because the reveal about what’s behind Jake is handled with so much buildup.
Then there’s the way the graphic novel handles this same moment.
[Image ID: Three panels from the graphic novel of The Invasion. The first shows the back of Marco’s head and Jake’s face, with a tiger visible over Jake’s shoulder. Marco’s speech bubble says “it’s a tiger, Jake. It’s a big, scary tiger.” Then Jake’s says “Okay, don’t run. That might get its attention.” The second panel shows Marco’s face against a flat green background; Marco’s speech bubble says “Oh... I think it knows we’re here, Jake. I think it’s looking right at us.” The third panel shows Jake’s face against a flat green background; Jake’s speech bubble says, “Don’t freak out. I have an idea. If I can acquire it, that’ll put it into a trance. I hope.”]
There’s no slow-roll reveal. We as the audience see the tiger at the same time as Marco tells us verbally it’s there. Not only that, but the dialogue feels the need to tell us that the tiger is big and scary, whereas in the original text we were shown that the tiger is big and scary from Marco’s reaction to it. Almost as soon as the tiger’s presence is established, we move into close-up drawings of Jake and Marco’s faces so that the tiger disappears from the frame.
I think there are loads of better ways you could convey that same reveal, that don’t resort to telling us there’s “a big, scary tiger” when a graphic novel could so easily show us instead. The most obvious one: take all of the dialogue off of that top panel. Just give us a drawing of Jake... and a tiger looming over him. Change the angle of the drawing so that the tiger dominates the frame and unavoidably draws attention, ideally through taking advantage of it being neon orange against a dull green background. Angle the drawing to make the tiger look huge and Jake look tiny where he cowers against its haunch. Then we’re being shown that there’s a big, scary tiger, without having to have Marco tell us about it in a speech bubble that (I also want to note) partially obscures the tiger itself and makes it 80% less frightening.
There are other ways to get this same idea across, of course. Do a point-of-view shot over Jake’s shoulder that shows him craning his neck and catching a glimpse of what’s behind him, drawing the tiger so close-up that we only get an impression of big and orange. Ditch all the dialogue from the whole page, and just show the reaction images. That requires changing the original text, but why the heck not? Word-for-word repetition is never gonna be the best way to translate a work from medium to medium.
And if you are going to go for super-faithful translation, then at least take advantage of the art form. Comics are not a realistic medium; the drawing style is meant to exaggerate various characteristics of the characters to get certain points across. Marco’s “holy shit, it’s a tiger” face in that second panel is... underwhelming, to say the least.
To keep with my original Batman example, here’s Batman’s terrified face upon learning that Robin is probably dead:
[Image ID: An image from Injustice Comics that shows a close-up of Batman’s face, with a mask that goes down to his nose but leaves his eyes and mouth uncovered. His mouth is halfway open and his lips are drawn back, his eyes very wide and slightly misaligned.]
Notice all the ways that the art is subtly unrealistic: the lines formed by Batman’s face as he opens his mouth in anguish and horror are too far away and too large for real human musculature. His eyes are lost in a sea of black cowl, too small for the rest of his face. His mask itself — in spite of being made of rigid bulletproof material — has deformed around the stretch of his grimace, the furrow of his brow. His shoulders are literally up around his ears, again not a pose that it is physically possible to adopt. Because it’s not supposed to be an anatomically correct drawing of an expression of horror; it’s meant to convey the horror Batman is feeling through deliberate distortions in the art style.
And again, here’s Marco’s “holy shit, it’s a tiger” face:
[Image ID: A close-up from the second panel of the earlier Animorphs comic, showing Marco’s face. His eyebrows slant up in the middle and his mouth is conveyed with a down-turned line.]
To be fair, there are some distortions in the way he’s drawn, most notably the way his hair is standing on end. But it’d be easy to do so much more. Draw his eyes at twice their usual diameter. Have his mouth be halfway open to reveal a black void within (see Batman example). Add shadows and lines where normally there are none on his face, to convey that its whole shape has changed. Give us those little wiggly lines that indicate he’s trembling. None of those are things that human faces realistically do, but comics are not a realistic art form. The goal is to communicate emotion, not to have perfect images of people’s faces.
Anyway, that’s just one example of the effect. I think it’s writ large throughout the whole story. There are too many moments of Jake talking to the reader or his friends, not enough moments where the art communicates without relying on the text. Too many moments from Jake’s point of view, not enough where the “camera angle” moves away from him to show us what Tobias or Cassie is doing instead. Too much adherence to the book, which is a great book but ideally should be interpreted rather than reproduced exactly. Let the comics be comics, even though doing so will require greater departure from the original novels.
