Bookshelf Source Material

I am a huge fan of the "Harry Dresden" novels by Jim Butcher. Even though Sci-Fi has a series based on the novels, they're not the novels. In fact, there are huge differences between novel and TV show format. However, a comic can do a direct adaptation with more ease than a TV show or a movie can.

With the translation of the first "Anita Blake" book into comic book form being impressive, I can see that a "Harry Dresden" comic would rock. In a perfect world that comic would be written by Joss Whedon or Peter David. As for who the artist would be, I am not sure, but maybe someone with a slight manga-esque influence who is also a stickler to detail.

Being a bibliophile, I have read more books than I can possibly remember. Looking through my personal library, I would love to see the following adapted into comic book or graphic novel format.

Lloyd Alexander has a large and devoted following — and deservedly so. I would really really really like to see an adaptation of his Vesper Holly series: red-headed sixteen year-old adventuress drags her Watson-like guardian on grand adventures in search of lost tombs, lost cities and lost treasures. Perfect for fans of Alison Dare and Leave It To Chance.

Diane Duane's So You Want To Be a Wizard series is a wonderful contemporary tween/teen fantasy. Perfect for getting Potter fans to read comics. And, Duane's Star Trek magnum opus Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages, which features one of the best female characters in sci fi, Captain Ael i-Mhiessan t'Rllaillieu, and explains the discrepancy between the original series Romulans and those of the Next Generation.

Considering the success of The Hedge Knight, adaptations of the epic fantasy series of David and Leigh Eddings and Patricia Wrede would be a good choice. The Eddings' Elenium trilogy remains of my all-time faves (love the Child Goddess), while Wrede's Enchanted Forrest Chronicles turns every fairy tale trope on its head, often hilariously. And the dragon King is a girl!

One of the most exciting and well-researched novels I read (and reread) as a teen was Eloise McGraw's Mara Daughter of the Nile. Espionage, intrigue and unrequited love in ancient Egypt. *le sigh* And it all ends happily ever after.

Speaking of happily ever after ... why doesn't Dark Horse adapt some more romance novels? Manga-style, American, whatever. I'd love to see a comic adaptation of Linda Howard's Heart of Fire (female archeologist and grumpy jungle guide search for lost Amazonian city) and Mary Jo Putney's Dancing on the Wind (Regency-era espionage).

Oh, and finally (!) Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. I'd like to see his hopeful world in full color. :) Oh, yeah, and Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing. Um, yeah. I'm sure there are lots more, but I should stop for now.

My friend Pancha and I were just talking about this subject the other day. We'd like to see manga adaptations of Jane Austen novels. Pride and Prejudice would be perfect: it's got romance, intense inner drama, costumes and mansions to be drawn by underpaid assistants, everything. We also want manga versions of the "Little House" books, although the artist would have to think of ways to incorporate more sex.

Maybe it's just because I've been sucking down Richard K. Morgan's "Takeshi Kovacs" books, that I'd like to see either an adaptation of these into comics form, or, better yet, an OGN about Takeshi Kovacs's life when he was actually a UN Envoy.

Takeshi Kovacs spends several key sequences of Altered
Carbon talking about a friend of his, Jimmy DeSoto, destroyed in a viral strike during a vicious battle at a place called Innennin. He also spends a goodly amount of time thinking about Virgina Viadura, his Envoy trainer.

Given that Kovacs's Envoy psycho-conditioning is like steel plate for the psyche, I think it says everything that he recalls Virginia with such nostaliga and longing, and that he mourns Jimmy's destruction to this day.

So, how did these two make such a connection to the emotionally blunted Takeshi? How did Jimmy and Takeshi click? Later, in Woken Furies we see Virginia, but she's been "retired" for decades at that point. What was she like as the Envoy trainer that Takeshi both feared and worshiped?

Morgan has said in interviews that he has no more planned Takeshi Kovacs novels, because he's said what he wants to say through the character. And, in the sense that the Takeshi Kovacs novels are rather literary and not casual reads (they are full of commentary about what it means to be human and class warfare and socio-political trends), I completely agree. However, Morgan is an excellent action adventure writer, and I think/hope that if he decided to tell us about Kovacs's time in the Envoys, he'd feel that he had, if nothing else, a "ripping good yarn" left in him.

So, why comics and not prose? Because Kovacs's time in the Envoys, where he found himself "needlecast" across the galaxy time and again to be sleeved in a high-tech combat-ready body, on strange worlds, is all action and would make make a "widescreen comic" in the truest sense of the word.

I think Wicked by Gregory Maguire would work well as a comic book. It has some outstanding (and somewhat familiar) characters, unusual plot twists in a unique storyline, and some scenes that I would love to see drawn out. With its success as a book and a musical, I think if the right creative team got behind it, it could be a very successful comic book.

Perhaps the Anne Rice novels, any of them. Fantasy/Horror novels seem to lend themselves more easily to comic book format. A comic book version of Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon might be interesting, considering its focus on a young girl. Laurel K. Hamilton's "Anita Blake" novels would make everyone hot and bothered. I love Jim Butcher's "Dresden" books and they would be great for a comic book series.

Harry Potter, of course, but I've said that before. It would be cool to see other writers tackle the various scenes from points of view other than Harry's (yes, like what's been done in fanfiction).

Since the Dresden Files TV series has proven a little lacking in the special effects and has veered a bit far from the books, I'd like to see a comic book series that stays truer to the novels. After all, in two-dimensional art, one can draw anything a mind can conjure up!

James Lee Burke's "Robicheaux" hard-boiled detective novels have such brilliant descriptions of Nawlins and Louisiana, I could see them being done in comic-form. I'd like to see Moonstone tackle it; they've proven themselves already in the genre.

Anne Bishop's fantasy universe, The Black Jewels, tells about corruption in a society where people have magic of varying rank (and some have none at all). One girl has the power to even the playing field — or destroy it entirely. It's up to those who love her to keep her safe and sane, while their enemies — including some individuals who actually mean well — try to either break or use her. The world is very strongly developed, the visuals evocative, and the characters deeply engrossing. I was introduced to the series by a friend back in 2002 or so, and have since read all the books over and over — I've read the main trilogy at least four times. I've already throught they'd make a wonderful set of movies or a television series — I could as easily see it in comic form. Especially if Wendy Pini illustrated it — what a match made in heaven!

You could probably make a pretty good tongue in cheek horror comics miniseries out of A. Lee Martinez's Gil's All Fright Diner. This novel is the frequently humorous tale of a well-intentioned blue collar werewolf named Duke, his schlumpy, slightly inept vampire pal Earl, and their efforts to defend an obscure Texas diner from the machinations of an over-ambitious teenage sorceress who wants to use it as a portal to unleash a horde of fearsome elder gods on our dimension. In the process, the two pickup-driving creatures of the night must battle zombies (human, bovine, and demonically prefabricated); assuage the suspicions of local law enforcement official Sheriff Marshall Kopp; and attempt to aid the lonely ghost of a female hitchhiker who is now the sole non-zombified inhabitant of a nearby graveyard.

This project would be a natural for certain incorrigibly humor-prone comics-scripters such as Peter David, Keith Giffen, and/or J.M. DeMatteis. Perhaps the story could be paired with art by Mike Wieringo (whose characteristic slightly cartoony, large-footed renditions of the human form lend themselves well to goofiness), or Todd Nauck, who ably illustrated many of David's abundantly spoof-sprinkled scripts for the late lamented DC team title Young Justice.

You could also make an entertaining OEL (original English language)/global manga series out of Shanna Swendson's Enchanted, Inc. and its various sequels. The heroine of this chick-lit fantasy novel is a small-town girl turned New York City secretary who suddenly finds herself being intensively recruited by a mysterious company whose real name turns out to be Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc. — and they're not just talking about stage magic.

It seems that protagonist Katie is one of the few humans around who is totally devoid of all traces of magical ability herself. Paradoxically, this makes her invaluable to the undercover magical conglomerate, since it also renders her immune to the illusion spells they — and their more unscrupulous competitors — use to cloak their more unorthodox activities from both each other and the general public.

The first novel in the series, at least, is a bit Mary Sue-ish. Katie rapidly attracts the romantic interest of both Owen, a shy but good-looking wizard who is clearly being groomed to take over the company someday, and Rod, a charming but relatively ordinary-looking sorcerer who seems intrigued by Katie's down to earth non-reaction to the glamorous illusion which has every other woman of his acquaintance — even co-workers who know he uses a spell instead of a skin-care regimen — drooling over him as if he were Johnny Depp. As if that weren't enough, Katie's combination of magical immunity and modern-day business sense gets her promoted to the exalted post of executive assistant to company CEO Merlin — yes, that Merlin — on her second day at work.

But both the premise and the characters are sufficiently interesting and well-developed that Katie's occasionally excessive ordinariness-turned-specialness is merely a bit distracting at times, rather than disruptive to the point of becoming annoying. In any case, this potentially problematical aspect of the story could be further downplayed in a manga-format adaptation, perhaps by an established mistress of shoujo-style romantic comedy like Svetlana Chmakova (Dramacon, Chasing Rainbows, and the CosmoGirl magazine comic strip "The Adventures of C.G.") or Amy Kim Ganter, whose Sorcerers & Secretaries (TOKYOPOP) sounds as if it could be part of an Enchanted, Inc. series already. (It's actually about an aspiring fantasy writer who is so preoccupied with the story she's writing about a wizard's quest to redeem his dragon friend that she barely notices her bookstore clerk ex-neighbor's attempts to court her.) Of course, since both these creators write as well as draw their own original material, the publishers of the hypothetical Enchanted, Inc. global manga would probably have to find someone else.

OK so there are a few works that come to mind - maybe some of them have already been done? But the 13-year-old in me wants to see Anne McCaffrey's dragon-books turned to comics. And of course I would like Charles Vess to do the artwork. Lord Valentine's Castle, and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld also come to mind. I'd like to say Grass by Sheri S. Tepper but I'm not sure the emotion of the internal experience of (spoiler-edited-by-me) would convey well to comic form. But what about a couple of Tom Robbins books like Jitterbug Perfume?

Could I list something more modern? Sadly, I can't. I went into our "library" to look for some recent readings and all I found were comics and graphic novels. So unless someone thinks Real Simple would made a good comic, or Sensational Knitted Socks, then I'm afraid it seems that I am already reading good comics.

Wait! I take that back. Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, would make a tremendous graphic novel. Oh yes, Precious, it would.

On the fantasy side of things, I'd love to see a version of Carol Kendall's The Gammage Cup; its cast of engaging characters (including one named "Muggles", which is why I was vastly entertained by the term in the Harry Potter books) and the quest nature of the story are suited perfectly to serialization.

Somewhat along the same lines would be The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley, a Victorian morality tale about a young chimney-sweep who dies and becomes a "water baby" before embarking on a series of strange and often frightening adventures. I read this book as a girl and was enormously affected by the descriptions of the fairies Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, the cruel otters biting out the throats of fish, and the lazy Doasyoulikes eating flapdoodle and already-roasted pigs that ran about in the land of Readymade. If it sounds like some sort of rude precursor to Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" books, well, that would be a pretty apt comparison (had Gaiman been concerned with Christian morality stories, that is).

And finally, to (somewhat) get away from the fantastical, I'd love to see a comic book version of David Levithan's highschool-with-heart novel Boy Meets Boy. My caveat in the preceeding sentence is due to the setting of the book, a little American town where sexuality isn't a big deal and the main character of the book, Paul, can date boys at a school where the star quarterback and the homecoming queen are the same person. This makes for a book with less of the weighty issues that normally accompany LGBT-themed stuff, and more deliciously frothy, unexpectedly witty, and entirely fun teenage romance.

I've just realized that all three of my books are young adult reads! Well, Chuck Palahniuk's creepy, semi-supernatural Lullabye would make an excellent comic along the Hellblazer vein, and the postrevolution sci-fi book China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh with its textured setting and coloured flying contraptions would be fascinating to see illustrated. And definitely not for kids. *g*