THE MULTIFACETED YOUNG ADULT NOVEL Hanna Dorn HON400
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
TEXT TO FILM TO GRAPIC NOVEL: THE MULTIFACETED YOUNG ADULT NOVEL Hanna Dorn HON400: Thesis January 19, 2017 Introduction: In Spring of 2015, I was inspired by secondary and and collegiate educators who encouraged me to foster my writing skills and write a young adult fantasy novel. Working with Dr. Robert Otten within the English department via an independent study course, I completed a rough draft amounting to about 51,000 words. The work is tentatively titled The Mortal Eternal. The premise involves a group of supernatural beings, the Novae, who reincarnate periodically in human bodies, tasked with watching over the human race to protect humanity from itself. A rebellion arises within the group who deem that humans are cursed by their free will, and are no longer worth protecting. The rebels take openly hostile actions, including kidnapping the protagonist Jaeson’s romantic partner, Victoria. Jaeson and his friends must infiltrate the rebels and discover their plans while continuing to carry out the tasks delegated by their leader. With a manuscript of my own completed, I then looked at comparable young adult fantasy works, particularly those on bestseller lists. Massively successful young adult novels are developing a multifaceted approach to marketing and distributing their work across digital platforms and audiences. A frequent next step for a published novel is adapting the work into film, and increasingly, a graphic novel format. This is a continuing trend that is exemplified by a multitude of works. I will draw from these examples and their processes to synthesize an appropriate multifaceted approach to marketing my own work. The next step of this process is to create a graphic novel of The Mortal Eternal. In order to imagine the form of The Mortal Eternal as a graphic novel, its predecessors must be analyzed in terms of effectiveness, style or form, and manner of storytelling. What genres are trending amongst the Young Adult (YA) category now? What about these genres makes them particularly suitable for visual adaptations? From both of these approaches, what will I draw on for my own execution? Based on the works reviewed, I have drawn that the YA novels that are most commonly adapted into both film and graphic novels are works that centralize around an apparently ordinary protagonist, generally female, faced with a supernatural situation in an urban setting with elements beyond our current place and time. Visualization and Expanding the Audience: Transforming the written novel into other forms of media and engagement, such as graphic novels and film, is an effective form of expanding the audience created by the original novel manuscript. Readers who are initially fully engaged in the original novel often actively seek out more content related to the source medium. Sometimes this is in the form of fan-created works such as art and fan-created adaptations of the original work known as fan fiction. The expression of both the desire and the creation of these fan-created works is found all throughout social media and creative website platforms, such as the artwork site www.deviantart.com. Authors and publishers have sought to profit from this desire for additional content based on the original work by providing visual adaptations through legitimate outlets. Included in these visual adaptations are films and graphic novels. This approach is profitable because the pre-established property already exists, giving filmmakers and graphic novels a plot and characters to work with to transform into a monetized form of entertainment. These adaptations then become cyclic in nature because the audience can come in from different media. The original intent of adapting the written YA novel into other media was to profit off of the readers’ desire for additional content. However, the adaptation cycle continues to be an effective method of expanding the audience across all platforms. For example, when Harry Potter was adapted into film, the target audience was individuals who had read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. However, there were a multitude of individuals who had not read the book, but then went to see the movie for the sake of the movie itself. These individuals who had only experienced the movie now wanted more content as well, so they read the book. Even after all seven books were adapted into eight films, the franchise continues to profit off of the relatively newly released fully illustrated adaptations of the book. In fact, sales jumped by 29% with the 2015 release, even though the last movie was released in 2014. The Graphic Novel: Graphic novels are pictorial literary forms that are intended to balance written word and visual storytelling to narrate a plot. This form of sequential visual art differs from other illustrated texts, such as the comic book, in that these collectives are read in the same fashion as a book. This means that the work has a single storyline with a definitive beginning and end. Comic books, on the other hand, are periodicals without a planned ending, often with multiple universes and storylines with intellectual properties (IPs) belonging to a company rather than an individual. This definition of a graphic novel can be interpreted in several ways. Two important aspects are the relation between text and illustration and artistic style. Viewing the essence of graphic novels down to its roots of sequential art, the ancestors of the graphic novel could be considered the wall paintings and storytelling murals of ancient people. Many consider Rodolphe Topffer to be the father of modern comics for the use of panel borders and interdependent synthesis of text and illustration, mechanics which are used in pictorial-textual sequential art. His works (pictured left) were popular in the mid-1800s and were the first of their kind in the print industry, utilizing illustration as the primary element with captions underneath. In the 20th century, there are three important benchmark authors. Beatrix Potter’s works were the inception of the use of illustration in correlation with text to tell a story from start to finish. Dr. Seuss’s children’s literary works contain the rudimentary literary elements of a graphic novel. The sequential art needs both text and sequential pictorial forms in order to function as a complete story. Pictured above are pages from both Seuss’s work (top) and Beatrix Potter’s work (bottom). With Seuss’s work, the text interacts more directly with the images- the scene composed around the words, akin to the basis of the graphic novel. This is different from Beatrix Potter’s works in that her primary illustrations are on separate pages. However, it is important to note that Beatrix Potter’s stories can be understood through the illustrations alone, whereas Dr. Seuss’s works cannot be understood without the text. The illustrations need more context in order to be understood. Taking this concept further, bridging the gap between the illustrated book and the graphic novel, is an example like Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (left). The page layout changes as the story progresses to flow along with the protagonist delving deeper into his fantasy world. Pictured above, the boundary between text and illustration closes as the protagonist progresses into the fantasy world of the wild things. That separation of text and picture then returns as the story takes him back to the human world. Modern graphic novels in the current definition of sequential art have many different forms stylistically through artistic merit and cultural influence. Culturally, graphic novels can be divided broadly by place of origin. Two forms dominate: Eastern and Western. Starting after World War II, A foreign form of the graphic novel medium popular in the United States is Japanese 漫画 manga, pronounced mān-ga. Manga is traditionally read from right to left to match the way vertical Japanese text is read, unlike Western graphic novels. In Western translations of Japanese manga, the work is sometimes “flipped” to read right to left. The stylistic approach to illustrating the story varies both by the individual artist’s personal style and by the trademarks of manga’s sub- genres. Manga as a whole, however, generally maintains some basic stylistic principles when illustrating the human form: small mouths, larger eyes, minimalistic noses, dramatic hair, and exaggerated proportions. As of early 2017, the most popular manga publication currently selling in the United States is the first volume in the series Attack on Titan by Hajime Isayama. The sci-fi fantasy series takes place thousands of years in the future where massive walls protect humanity from humanoid monsters, called Titans, that eat them. An important distinction of this work is the art style. It combines the basics of the manga style and an incredibly apparent knowledge of human anatomy drawing techniques. Pictured above, the author illustrates a demonstration of the muscular striations of the human form through the rendering of the Titan monster. This knowledge of human anatomy also influences the style overall, in synthesis with the genre. Though the manga is classified as sci-fi fantasy, the nature of the plot, humanoid giant monsters eating humans, brings in elements of the horror genre. These elements carry through in the art style, further pictured below, utilizing knowledge of realism and human anatomy combined with the basis of manga styles and exaggeration. The result is a form of sequential art that is both dynamic and unsettling. The illustrations match the storytelling in a manner that is engaging and fluid, keeping the reader moving through the story almost thoughtlessly. Another work of a more historical significance in the manga classification is Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto. Spanning 72 volumes, the series has sold over 220 million copies of its volumes as of October 2015, making it the best selling manga series in history.