The Handmaid's Tale (Graphic Novel): the graphic novel (Gilead, 1)

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The rich imagery of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale has inspired multiple visual retellings, including, most recently, the hit Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne — or, Offred — the titular handmaid seeking escape and salvation from the dystopian future of Gilead. Watercolors can be used to evoke all sorts of powerful emotions, from Jill Thompson’s work on Beasts Of Burden to Dustin Nguyen’s incredible use of shape and white space on Descender. But Commander Waterford invites Offred into his study to play Scrabble and it becomes not just a game of words but a game of power. Between the original novel and the television series, more people than ever have at least a passing knowledge of the plot, and there won’t be too many surprises in this adaptation.

Any graphic novel that relies so heavily on uniforms is going to have this challenge, but Nault stuck to the same slender and conventionally attractive white women throughout. Long before I was ever approached about the graphic novel, I did see the Danish opera of The Handmaid's Tale," she says. Later, she came to love Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics — "They have such an amazing use of simplified shape and color, almost like graphic design" — and Taiyo Matsumoto's work. Like Atwood, Nault portrays her as an older woman, where in the TV series Yvonne Strahovsky shows her as more of a contemporary of Offred’s. It's full of bizarre visuals that would be so striking to see on the page — weird hybrid animals and overgrown cityscapes.It's the realization of two years' work, from initial sketches to final creation, to refining the art and ensuring what she made remained consistent with Margaret Atwood's vision. A group of eco-activists sit around a campfire in a Pacific Northwest forest, discussing how they can convince the rest of the world to join their cause. The implication is that age and lack of beauty are somehow moral failings as Serena Joy, Aunt Lydia, and the Commander are shown in great contrast to the Handmaids, Nick, and Luke, each of them beautiful and superior in their resistance. Her early process started before the first season of Hulu's show aired, and she purposefully avoided the series from thereon out. She’s drawn like the protagonist in a gothic romance, meeting Nick for a clandestine moment that seems to confuse desire for humanity.

Towards the end of the novel, the Handmaids are tricked into thinking that one of the Guardians is a rapist. But the Handmaids are pawns in this story, and this scene shows how they are manipulated by the constant threat of death – or worse. That relish for the weird, striking, and bizarre — and the ability to see the beauty within those elements — makes for an intense creative partnership. All the things I see, experience, and consume will live in my head and mix together there, sometimes over years," she says.

com/books/2016/aug/10/speculative-or-science-fiction-as-margaret-atwood-shows-there-isnt-much-distinction. I really loved it — the design was very minimalist, and it had a sinister and discordant quality that was very unsettling. It's this ability to accommodate both the mundane and the fantastic that suits the graphic form to the The Handmaid's Tale's demands, as "comics and graphic novels can switch seamlessly between abstract and literal imagery," Nault says. Nault, a Canadian artist based in Vancouver, is no stranger to Atwood's literary worlds: Her visual work can be seen in the graphic novel of Atwood's Angel Catbird Vol.

She did, however, encounter another interpretation of the book that impacted her own subsequent vision. All this is to say that The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel has a high bar to clear, thanks to the popularity of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book as well as the more recent Hulu series. In this case, the reader is cued to understand the “bad thing” as the terrifying news blaring out of the television. In the second series of the TV Serena Joy has her little finger cut off for daring to read from the Bible. The book is striking to look at inside and out, a testament to the impact that good cover design can have.

Lisa Jadwin has published a very detailed article on the context in which the novel was published the first time around which might have contributed to its success. Here is a reading list of non-fiction books exploring ideas that matter, including books by Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Ai Weiwei, Chelsea Manning and more. Jezebel’s shouldn’t exist but, just as the Handmaids have their secret Mayday network, so the Commanders have their illicit entertainment and, as their relationship develops, Commander Waterford decides to show Offred this hidden world. In its English-language usage in arts and literature since the mid-twentieth century, “speculative fiction” as a genre term is often attributed to Robert A. Nault has great skill when it comes to water colors, but her style is poorly matched to the subject matter.

Adaptations can be a difficult to wrangle under the best of circumstances, attempting to reframe and reshape a complete work so that it can fit into another medium. I tried to get [sketches] down on paper as quickly and purely as I could manage," Nault says, adding that she used the images as a basis for, later, more refined executions. My hope was to not just show the story with pictures, but to capture the spirit of the novel," she says. As a child in a French language elementary school, she discovered Tintin and Asterix, as well as the early-20th-century Little Nemo in Slumberland. It’s frequently difficult to tell June and Ofglen apart, let alone the second Ofglen from the first.She describes a scene late in the story to demonstrate, when Offred, the narrator, "thinks of bodies she's seen hanging on the wall.