Between Being and Belonging

Home , Chris Riddell, The Graveyard Book

Between Being and Belonging:

Home and Identity in The Graveyard Book represented through Image and Text

Shonali Alm-Basu

English Studies G2E, Bachelor 15 credits VT/2020 Supervisor: Jakob Dittmar Special Thanks: Björn Sundmark

Abstract ...... 3

Introduction ...... 3

Part One ...... 8

Material and Layout ...... 8

Gaiman and the Graveyard ...... 8

Part Two: Home and Identity (Being and Belonging) ...... 13

Home ...... 13 Identity ...... 16

Part Three: Adaptation and Form ...... 17

Part Four: McKean and Riddell ...... 23

Part Five ...... 34

Conclusion ...... 34

Works Cited: ...... 38

Secondary Works ...... 39

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the interplay and function of visual and textual narrative working together to expand and express a story. It will specifically analyze The

Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and its accompanying illustrations provided by Chris

Riddell and Dave McKean. This investigation will also consider the roles of identity and home, and their impact on the narrative as they are developed in the interplay of images and text. Analysis focused on the aspects of adaptation, form, and the concept of thirdspace will extend and expand the investigation further and raise questions for new research on the subject.

Introduction

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book straddles many differing fields of narrative expression. Firstly, Gaiman himself was inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

Gaiman re-imagined the over-arching features of The Jungle Book into his own work with The

Graveyard Book. In turn, Dave McKean and Chris Riddell each tried their respective hands at adapting Gaiman’s text with illustration for two separate editions. Each artist interpreted the narrative differently, adapting different plot points, but both still managed to evoke a sense of congruency with the text itself. This novel has also been adapted into a two-volume graphic novel by P. Craig Russel and eight other creative minds; however, this project does not intend to analyze these graphic novel renditions in detail.

Using the framework of image and text, this BA paper will seek to identify specific notions evident in the narrative that are transferrable throughout each adaptation of Gaiman’s text. This includes but is not limited to: Studying the character and function of the protagonist,

Nobody Owens, chronologically from his origin to his exeunt from the graveyard, but also conceptually, as an entity potentially inhabiting two worlds, within and/or between these worlds. In regard to these worlds, we will investigate how the landscape of the graveyard is presented visually and textually in The Graveyard Book. We will also analyze the conceptualization of home and refuge for Nobody Owens as a recognizable structure within the narrative. This particular portion of analysis will build on the previous works of Marcello

Giovanelli and Edward Soja. The investigation of this space will work in conjunction with the function of Nobody Owens as a narrative Form as per Caroline Levine and will also be compared with Kipling’s portrayal of Mowgli in The Jungle Book and as potential Thirdspace by Edward Soja. More specifically, we will also further investigate the graveyard as home and how we might define the graveyard as home to Nobody Owens. Returning to characterization,

Nobody Owens as a maturing protagonist will be identified both visually and textually. Bod, as he is known to his community, grows into his identity. He matures, visually and textually as the narrative progresses, gradually raising questions of belonging as a living being to a place that is dedicated to the dead and being alive in it, but still belonging to that very place. It can be argued that the graveyard has become a “thirdspace” as defined by Edward Soja, and that

Bod adjusts in his “form” to adhere to the structure of the graveyard.

Bod’s character changes when interacting with social communities, alive, dead, or somewhere in-between, further complicating the question of belonging. A detailed investigation of the relationship between the ghost of Liza Hempstock and Bod will concretize the different subversions of form, both visual and textual, instigated by the two illustrators, and of course,

Neil Gaiman’s text first. The final portion of this project will aim to exemplify the necessity of valuing narratives that draw attention to a deeper cognitive apprehension of children’s literature, or rather, narratives that are intended for children. Many researchers have worked with this text previously, engaging a wide variety of theories and analyses, amounting to a great number of source materials for this BA project to draw from. This project is divided into five parts and will aim to utilize some of these previous works alongside the project’s own analysis.

The U.S. version of the novel is illustrated by Dave McKean, while the U.K. version

is illustrated by Chris Riddell, both published in the same year, 2008. The aim of this BA

project is to examine the nature of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and its adapted

illustrative forms, using a variety of methods. To investigate the setting of home and

landscape in this novel, this project will utilize the methods of Caroline Levine’s work on

Forms and Edward Soja’s work on Thirdspace. To better understand the character of Nobody

Owens, a combination of studies of illustration and visual representation (Hayley Campbell,

Alison Halsall, E.H. Gombrich and Renata Dalmaso) will be used to analyze characterization through image and text. This project will also employ the works of Björn Sundmark’s

Metacognition (2018), Marcello Giovanelli’s investigation of child readers and home (2016), and Maria Triscuizzi’s work on Visual Narrative (2017). These works, along with others included in the bibliography, will be used to understand and identify how The Graveyard

Book can be understood in children’s literature by readers of every age.

The Graveyard Book in its many reiterations retains the quality of telling a knowable, recognizable story. But if we look a little deeper, it will be found that it is actually a combination of components that make the text the stable element of the story. For example, the novel plays on features such as recognizability, in the sense that specific elements of the story are not new to the audience, even if the overall narrative is dressed up in a new way.

The theme of a child raised or sheltered by unknown forces in a seemingly feral landscape is a storyline commonly found in children’s literature. To many fans of Gaiman’s work, The

Graveyard Book is also in keeping with the themes of his other spooky works intended for children. This being said, there is certainly a unique choice to decide to write a children’s book full of dead people. But this was not Gaiman’s original intent with the narrative. In an interview with Roger Sutton, Gaiman himself tells how, “The Graveyard Book was begun many years before those titles, not as a children's book, not as an adult book, but as simply a first page inspired by his son pedaling a tricycle through a cemetery near the family's then- home in England” (2). Long before The Jungle Book inspired the framework for the story, it was Gaiman’s children that kept his writing going. Not until later did Gaiman consider the framework of The Jungle Book: “And then I thought, you know you could write something

like The Jungle Book and set it in a graveyard. And it was just this lovely little nice clean thought. And then I thought you'd call it The Graveyard Book. And you'd have dead people bringing him up, and probably in the Bagheera role I'd have a vampire and maybe a werewolf as Baloo. And it just sort of clicked. It felt right” (3). After many years of stopping and starting and waiting “to see if he was good enough yet” (240) Gaiman tried again to write but this time he started when Nobody Owens is eight years old rather than a baby.

However, now that the book is here and has been reimagined so many times, we cannot look at the text in isolation. As Linda Hutcheon begins in Theory of Adaptation,

“Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiency in adaptation; so too is change” (4). Thus, it is not in some sort of stasis, trapped within a page.

Expressed especially through Dave McKean’s work, the narrative flows in and out of the consciousness of the readers and indeed, in and out and between the structure of the physical novel itself. McKean, in particular, extends the visual narrative (the illustrations) into the textual one (Gaiman’s text), while Riddell takes a much more traditional approach, framing images on their own full pages. We will investigate the implications of the superimposition of image and text in detail in Part Four of this paper. While different, these two distinct illustrators express equally the original text’s narrative and key points similarly.

Understanding what is adapted differently by different artists, and what is expressed in the illustrations is key to investigating how image expands narrative and enhances text.

This is vital to understanding how the narrative functions, and what adaptations take place within its structure. Is the mere suggestion of interactive functions enough to keep a reader of any age engaged in the narrative? It is the answer to this chief question that this project seeks to find.

Part One: Material and Layout, Gaiman and the Graveyard

Significant to the analysis in this investigation is also the question of age. It is important to note that the novel in question, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, though intended for children, was originally discovered by myself as an adult. Therefore, it was encountered with a somewhat adult aesthetic perspective. This allows for perhaps a more nuanced understanding of the narrative and illustrative connections, than might otherwise have been present in a first reading.

This is not an undocumented subject of study. The Graveyard Book has been widely investigated by others, chief among them, Alison Halsall. Halsall catalogues diligently in her work Nobody’s Home: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Its Visual Adaptations, “All of these illustrated versions of The Graveyard Book point to the creators’ specific visual responses to Gaiman’s novel, individual aesthetic responses that also expand and broaden the audience base for The Graveyard Book” (334). Halsall seamlessly analyzes “the relationship between word and image” (334) in The Graveyard Book and its adaptations, stitching together in-depth and surface level research to create a well-rounded editorial of transmedia.

Edward Soja’s Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, The

Trialtectics of Spatiality (1996) will also be widely utilized in exploring the idea of home in the graveyard and in relation to Bod. This investigation will focus mainly on the notion of expandability in imagined thirdspace as, “(…) a combinatorial and unconfinable third choice that is radically open to the accumulation of the new insights and alternative that goes beyond

the (meta) mere acceptance of the dualized interrogative” (65). This will allow for an in- depth analysis of the character of Nobody Owens and his seemingly untethered existence.

As has been touched upon in the introduction, The Graveyard Book was indeed inspired by Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Gaiman himself draws these comparisons in an exclusive excerpt in the Newbery Award Gold Edition of The Graveyard Book as well as in the interview with Roger Sutton specifically about the release of this edition. Hayley

Campbell details similarly the shape of the novel as it originally was, with Gaiman in her own book, The Art of Neil Gaiman, “that it was a set of stories and that the hero would leave when he was about sixteen – and I thought: Why don’t I write about when Bod’s eight years old [Chapter 4, “The Witch’s Headstone”], when he’s the protagonist. I wanted him as a person, not a baby, and I wanted to find out what the interactions with the other characters are like” (241). Gaiman follows this adaptation through to fruition, turning Kipling’s Bagheera into his own Silas and Baloo into the stern Miss Lupescu, and so on.

The resulting narrative, however, takes a very different turn. The Graveyard Book gives to its protagonist what The Jungle Book withheld: choice. This deviation allows for characterization of introspection and ingenuity in the face of conflict. Furthermore, according to the analysis of Jennifer McStotts in The Jungle, the Graveyard and the Feral Child:

Imitating and Transforming Kipling Beyond Pastiche, “What Gaiman adds is introspection, a thoughtful consideration and compromise far more characteristic of Bod than of Mowgli”

(76). Knowledge is not beaten into Bod the way it is to Mowgli. Bod is never expected to blindly submit to total authority of others in the way that Mowgli is. Bod, by Gaiman’s hand, is rendered a very curious character, and he is an active part of the adventures he himself instigates. Gaiman, perhaps because of the original inspiration that came from seeing his own

son play so comfortably in a graveyard, throws his little character into a plot of wishful thinking, creating a whole family from a wisp of mist and mystery: “You might not have seen a pale, plump woman, who walked the path near the front gates, and if you had seen her, with a second, more careful glance you would have realized that she was only moonlight, mist, and shadow. The plump, pale woman was there, though. She walked the path that led through a clutch of half-fallen tombstones towards the front gates” (8). Gaiman renders a sense of happenstance at the same time as he manages a feeling complete plausibility. “The plump pale woman”, later known as Mistress Owens, enters the story the same way she leaves. “He tried to put his arms around his mother then, as he had when he was a child, although he might as well have been trying to hold mist, for he was alone on the path” (134). This executed continuity textually conveys the idea that the reader must believe what they cannot see. One has a mother, even if one cannot see her.

Another example of complexity in the text is Bod’s adventure in Ghûlheim in Chapter

Three The Hounds of God, akin to Mowgli’s adventure with the Bandar-log and the Lost City

(48) in The Jungle People. But this is not just an event that happens to a passive Bod. He is not swept away in his sleep as Mowgli is. Mowgli is spirited away by these monkeys, in part for questioning the authority of Baloo, his teacher, and for questioning authority in the first place. Bod meanwhile is given agency, specifically the agency to make mistakes, and to learn from them. He is curious and wants to see what the ghouls have to offer. When he is asked to join the ghouls in Ghûlheim, “Bod thought of Miss Lupescu and her awful food and her lists and her pinched mouth. “I’m game,” he said.” (PDF 37) Bod actively says yes. In fact, Bod specifically asks “Can I come with you” (PDF 36) when the ghouls tell him of Ghûlheim.

The lessons ‘taught’ in the text by Gaiman are subtle, as this novel is not in its design a teaching book. But when Bod makes his escape from the ghouls and is rescued by Miss

Lupescu, he has a rather profound revelation for a six-year-old: “But at least if he died, thought Bod, he would have died as himself, with all his memories, knowing who his parents were, who Silas was, even who Miss Lupescu was. That was good.” (PDF 41) While it is a profound way to convey the notion of mortality in a children’s book, it is not an unreachable concept. Dying as “himself” implies a sense of “self”, the first stirrings of identity, the idea that little Nobody Owens belongs somewhere and to someone. He even expresses a desire “to go home” (PDF 40) implying that he does indeed identify a home. The question of home will be revisited in part four of this investigation, but for now we will stay with the notion of the text of the book itself.

Time frames the foundation of this novel in an unusual authorial parallel. The book follows the childhood and maturation of Nobody Owens, but in tandem, intimately chronicles

Gaiman’s journey as a father. “I had set out to write a book about a childhood—it was Bod’s childhood, and it was in a graveyard, but still, it was a childhood like any other; I was now writing about being a parent (…)” Gaiman states in his Newbery Medal acceptance speech in

2009, “and the fundamental most comical tragedy of parenthood: that if you do your job properly, if you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won’t need you anymore.” This is the overarching theme of the entire book that in all forms is interpreted by these artists the same way. The text itself, “Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, Leave no path untaken” (PDF

134), the last words of Mistress Owens to her adopted son, sum up in a few almost forgotten phrases what it has taken Gaiman himself twenty odd years to understand. Illustrators Dave

McKean and Chris Riddell evoke the same heartfelt melancholy through image. Riddell

through the depiction of Bod’s solitary but confident retreating back, and McKean, through no apparent rendering of Bod at all, merely the wisp of the Lady on the Grey, who waits patiently, only one page away.

According to the study of The Many Graveyard Books: Artistic Collaborations and

Possible Multiple Readings in Illustrated Works, by Renata Dalmaso and Thayse

Madella, “The dynamics of the cemetery has its own social functions, its own rites of access, its own system of marginalization, which are also interconnected with the dynamics between life and death, living society and cemetery” (64). This analysis of the space of the graveyard allows us to view its structure within limits and as having limitations both narratively and imaginatively. Narratively, or textually, the graveyard is physically a mappable place. From the very beginning Gaiman gives the reader a subtly visual text/path to follow: “You could see the abandoned funeral chapel, iron doors padlocked, ivy on the sides of the spire, a small tree growing out of the guttering at roof level. You could see stones and tombs and vaults and memorial plaques” (8). Therefore, the reader can “see” and read simultaneously, while imagining the graveyard. As this novel is also illustrated (several times over), there is the added complexity of image, or illustration, interacting with text. Textually, this complexity is greatly due to the structure of the social forms of the graveyard, while the images conjured are fairly straightforward. But in conjunction with this text, the accompanying illustrations have a visual additive of complexity. The illustrated versions of The Graveyard Book might thereby be classified as a complex picturebook, as described by Björn Sundmark in his work

The Visual, the Verbal, and the Very Young: A Metacognitive Approach to Picturebooks. The

Graveyard Book, the illustrated versions, through this interplay of text and image employ the

“sustained character development, nonlinear and convoluted storylines, thematic complexity

and contradictory motivations, irony and subversion, and figurative language (metaphor, symbolism), (13/17)” necessary to define a complex picturebook. The complexity of this novel, however, is a subtle flavor. Gaiman’s general style is one of understatement, but this complicated employment of image to corresponding text is extended by the illustrators, Dave

McKean and Chris Riddell.

Part Two: Home and Identity (Being and Belonging)

Home

Home, as defined by the online Oxford English Dictionary, is most frequently described as ‘a dwelling’. It is “the fixed residence or household; the seat of domestic life and interests”. There are many ways to consider home, and The Graveyard Book does incorporate many of these perspectives into Bod’s upbringing in the graveyard. He has his bare necessities, as it were, of clothes and food provided by the vampiric Silas. Bod has the physical shelter of the crypt and the Owens’s tomb, as well as the immaterial shelter of parental protection by his adoptive parents. Bod even receives such domestic delights as education, through Miss Lupescu (PDF 31), Mr. Pennyworth (PDF 48) and Letitia Borrows

(PDF 49). But can we say that Bod’s home is fixed? Does the notion of his home not change and grow as he does?

Bod’s prior impression of home and blood family, safety and refuge is destroyed by the murdering man Jack, who kills Bod’s family and whom Bod himself only narrowly escapes. Home is not necessarily where a biological mother and father can be found but rather, home, for the sake of this project, is where a child might sleep the most soundly. For

Bod, it seems that place is in “a lovely little tomb by the daffodil patch” (PDF 14) where is he cared for by his adoptive parents, Mr. and Mrs. Owens. Nobody Owens grows in the weeds and the wiles of the graveyard, as though it were any commonplace home at all. Marcello

Giovanelli describes this relationship with home in the graveyard as, “The graveyard replaces the family home to become a physical and emotional nurturing space, which offers safety.

Consequently, Bod is able to pass his childhood and early teenage years there, before leaving to find an identity of his own” (182). Bod is raised by the ‘life of the graveyard’, and the community of the dead, and the solitary Silas. Gaiman turns the tradition of home, not so much upside-down, but on its side. If one tilts ones’ head to one side and forgets about conventional notions of family life, Bod’s upbringing isn’t terribly unusual at all. He has a mother, father, caretaker, and a home, sprawling as it might be. Indeed, the sprawling unlimited access to adventure Bod so enjoys throughout his childhood years is one of the cardinal reasons that the story works as a supernatural bildungsroman. This is an analysis

Derek Lee points out in his work on The Politics of Fairyland: Neil Gaiman and the

Enchantments of Anti-Bildungsroman, claiming that “the Gaiman anti-bildungsroman thus accepts fantasy as inherently escapist even while redefining escapism as a public discourse integral to both literature and human relations” (555). But this is in relation to Gaiman’s other works. This is not quite the case in The Graveyard Book. Bod grows up surrounded by the supernatural beings who raise him, but this is all perfectly natural and normal for him. It is true, Bod lives in a world of wonder and escapism of fantasy literature. But it is perfectly normal for him to talk with ghosts and witches and ancient druid spirits and vampires and hellhounds, and even ghouls are not presented to readers as marvels. Lee, quoting Bennett, claims that “to be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and every day.” (4) But in this world of the graveyard, it is Bod who is the extraordinary. The ‘live boy’, Nobody Owens, is curiously ordinary, setting the occupants of the graveyard at odds with each other only a handful of pages into the story. Upon his arrival, the society of the graveyard is turned topsy-turvy, each long dead archetype of character weighing in with an opinion. “A graveyard is not normally a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy, and each of the dead had a voice and an opinion as to whether the living 15

child should be allowed to stay and they were each determined to be heard, that night.” (PDF

15) Bod unknowingly introduces an extra growth of space, making room for himself in an unintentional existence of Thirdspace. The concept of Thirdspace, or “thirding” (61) was theorized by Edward Soja in his work, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real- and-Imagined Places, The Trialtectics of Spatiality. Soja states that “Thirding introduces a critical “other-than” choice that speaks and critiques through its otherness” (61). Bod, by his very existence, throws multiple communities and storylines into chaos, by providing exactly this “other-than” characterization. He is neither dead nor alive, nor is he a quite a ghost or a little boy. Yet, he is also all of these things, because the graveyard wills it so. He is merely

Nobody Owens, in possession of “the Freedom of the Graveyard” (PDF 26) and may walk wherever he chooses, between the living and the dead.

Inversely, the existence of extraordinary is ordinary to Bod. Furthermore, he grows, raised by the community in the graveyard and learns from them. His adventures as well, grow in impact and magnitude, increasing his experiential knowledge and following the path of the bildungsroman. His increasing knowledge and experiences lead him to learn not only about living and dying, but all the things that happen in-between. Gaiman’s driving force behind finishing the story began as a need to find out “what’s going to happen next”, as he explains to Roger Sutton in the interview It’s Good To Be Gaiman. It is this red thread that carries the story and the life of Nobody Owens forward, further enforcing the fact that The

Graveyard Book is not an anti-bildungsroman. It is an unexpected bildungsroman, full of ghosts and supernatural adventures, but also full of new-forged friendships and good humor.

The graveyard, simply put, keeps Bod safe. By the very power it is imbued with, the love borne by its expired inhabitants, the graveyard provides what is needed for a strange

little almost-ghost-boy to grow with. It is a family. As poignantly put by Alison Halsall,

“There is no fear in Gaiman’s graveyard on a day-to-day basis as our protagonist Nobody

(“Bod”) grows and matures. As both home and refuge, the graveyard offers him protection from the threats of the outside world, for a finite period of time at least. Bod escapes from the horrors of the everyday into the open arms of a ghost— in fact, many ghosts” (336). Bod grows and is unafraid of what might to other children be frightening, because those seemingly frightening entities and places have a logic and a structure, both textual and visual.

Identity

An analysis of Bod’s identity has also been covered by Alison Halsall in Nobody’s

Home: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Its Visual Adaptations based on the literary origins of Bod’s name, Nobody Owens: “At this moment the living toddler assumes his new identity of “Nobody Owens,” a name that is full of significance. First name Nemo or

“Nobody” takes him out of the realm of the living—he is, in effect, nobody important” (346).

Oddly enough, even though he is protagonist, one of the trickier queries regarding the analysis of this novel has been the question of who Nobody Owens is. What does he look like? It is not that there is no answer to these questions of identity, more that there are several simultaneously occurring possible answers. Bod is described early on as “his mother’s and father’s despair and delight, for there never was such a boy for wandering” (PDF 7). He is characterized as inherently curious from the get-go. Later, but only by a page, he is no more than “something on the ground” (PDF 8) when he is first discovered by the attentive Mistress

Owens. Not long after this he is quite specifically characterized as looking like “nobody but himself” (PDF 13). This is the sort of subtle first step in the text towards a very strategic de- characterization or intentional invisibility employed by Gaiman. However, this

characterlessness still creates a kind of form. Forms, according to Caroline Levine, in her ground-breaking book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, are “at work everywhere” (2). It is thusly unsurprising to find form, even in the seemingly formless.

Bod goes from being a curious toddler, a recognizable form to the reader, to something non-distinct, out of place, as seen through the eyes of the ghosts in the graveyard.

This is a strategic way to approach the notion of keeping Bod safe, by keeping him unidentifiable. To investigate further the elements of identity and home, it is now time to incorporate the theory of adaptation, as well as further consideration of Thirdspace and Form.

Part Three: Adaptation and Form

According to Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, “Form” can constrain, differ, overlap or intersect, travel or do political work in particular historical contexts. (4) So, what does Bod do as a “form”? Textually he is the form of a growing boy living in a graveyard, but as he grows and matures, he also enters many other overlapping

“forms” as well. He is not so much one form as he is multiple in sequence. While Bod is unquestionably alive, he is also a definite resident of the graveyard, an existence between the state of living and the state of dying. Bod can enter the living town and other worlds; therefore, he is a travelling form as well. Each illustrator, Riddell and McKean, in his turn adapts the form of Bod, shaping, constraining, moving and intersecting the character as needed for their interpretation and representation. If we consider only the construction of Bod as he is illustrated by each artist, we must conform our analysis to specific aesthetic conventions. As these illustrations are integrated into the text itself however, it is not viable to analyze them in isolation from each other. The text enhances the images, giving way to a symbiotic relationship of the two narrative forms. However, one stand-out feature of the illustration of Bod is accentuated by Dave McKean’s illustrations. We do not even see Bod’s face until chapter five of The Graveyard Book. We see his silhouette, we get the idea of a little boy, but we do not see his face until he is eleven years old. Riddell meanwhile wastes no time introducing us to characters and full face, full featured depictions of them. We meet this version of Bod in chapter three, at the age of six just before the “Hounds of God”.

McKean Fig. 1 (chapter five, Danse Macabre)

Riddell Fig. 1 (chapter three, The Hounds of God)

By the Freedom of the Graveyard, Bod “may walk where [he] choose(s)” (PDF 26).

He can follow the dead where they roam (granted, that isn’t terribly far), “fade” (once he learns how) and even enter dreams. Vulnerable to the elements, but alive to them as well,

Bod breathes, lying in wait for his life to begin, and fears nothing of death as “It’s only death.

I mean, all of my best friends are dead” (PDF 80). But what sets him apart is potential; the thing that hasn’t happened yet, the life still waiting to be lived. Bod’s guardian, Silas explains this:

“Yes.” Silas hesitated. “They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world.

You are not. You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do

anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will

change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made,

dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk.

But that potential is finished.” (PDF 80)

Bod does not take a static form. According to Silas, Bod can change. Bod can adapt to new and different ways of being, and as a result, accept a new way of belonging.

Once again, the significance of Bod’s name comes into play alongside the question of potential, as a turning point of movability and changeability in Bod. Alison Halsall, in her works, Nobody’s Home: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Its Visual Adaptations, analyzes this point of “potential” even further, noting that his name, “[His nickname] “Bod”,

(…) ironically calls attention to the tangibility of his body among the dead: he is the same as the ghosts but different in that he is still alive and therefore full of “infinite potential,” as

Silas eventually reminds him” (346). The very fact of his physical being is simultaneously characterized by his name “Nobody Owens” and by his name nickname, “Bod”. His potential for change and ability to learn and adapt is what sees him through to the end of the story.

Nobody Owens, Bod, is alive, in the sense that he is born of the living, with a beating heart, yet he is insubstantial, forgettable. Intentionally forgettable. Going further than the

curiosity of his name, Bod’s very safety is bolstered by this intentional feature of forgettability, allowing him to slip visually and textually into the shadows. His insubstantiality, an attribute given to him by the ‘Freedom of the Graveyard’ and meant to keep him safe, also works to erase, purposefully, his ‘life’ or imprint he makes outside of the graveyard. When Bod is caught by Abanazer Bolger, the Pawn Shop broker, in chapter four,

“The Witch’s Headstone”, he must quickly learn to “fade” (PDF 58) or disappear as the dead.

This becomes complicated for him, as he isn’t yet dead himself. However, with the help of

Liza Hempstock, a local ghost-witch, he manages it. This in itself is of interest, as Liza is another margin dweller, existing between the society of the Graveyard and its laws as well.

The Freedom of the Graveyard seems akin to the ‘lawlessness’ practiced by Liza. They are not ‘above’ the law, per se, but it is as though they are somehow adjacent to it. They exist inside the loophole of reality and physics of our world. Within this ‘loophole’, space is reorganized abstractly to configure to the existence of what we might now consider

“Thirdspace”, as defined by Edward Soja, a “limitless composition of life worlds” (70). Liza might go where she pleases, not because she has been given the Freedom of the Graveyard, but because she was a witch when she was alive, and therefore has taken that freedom in stride for herself. Liza and Bod are seemingly untethered, but also marginalized.

In the final chapter, Leavings and Partings, now a young adult, Bod yearns for a future in the outside world and a life beyond the graveyard. But he also begins to notice inwardly that he has outgrown his life in the Graveyard. This is evident in his last interaction with Liza Hempstock:

Liza’s voice, close to his ear, said, “Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens.

For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I. Say you will miss me.”

“Where are you going?” asked Bod. Then, “Of course I will miss you, wherever you

go...”

“Too stupid,” whispered Liza Hempstock’s voice, and he could feel the touch of her

hand on his hand. “Too stupid to live.” The touch of her lips against his cheek, against

the corner of his lips. (PDF 131)

Bod’s friendship with Liza is forever changed because Bod has changed, as change is an indicative quality of being alive. Change or the potential to change, as analyzed previously, is again what makes Bod so adaptable to different ways of living. It is an adaptation he does not seem to notice taking place. When Liza says, “Say that you will miss me” (PDF 131) she understands that Bod’s time in the graveyard, his home, is over. Bod, responding “Of course I will miss you, wherever you go...” (PDF 131) does not catch on to the fact that he is leaving until much later in the chapter. But Bod and Liza have a unique existence within this novel.

They can exist between homes. They express this differently, almost from opposite ends of the “alive or dead” spectrum. Bod, alive, is able to bounce between the world of the dead and of the living but his impact on the world of the dead is liminal. He can fade and haunt, but he cannot fully understand the experience of being a ghost. Liza meanwhile, the ghost of a dead witch, is able to flit in and out of the world of the living, again with a limited capacity to create chaos in the lives of the living. Essentially, between these two characters, a space is created. It is again, not quite in the graveyard, but rather, adjacent to it. It is a type of space that Edward Soja calls “Thirdspace”. Sojas claims that regarding Thirdspace, “It is both a space that is distinguishable from other space (physical and mental, or first and second) and a transcending composite of all spaces” (62). By this definition, Liza and specifically Bod, exist in this “transcending composite” of a multitude of spaces. He is a travelling and

evolving form in the “limitlessly expandable scope of the spatial imagination” (65) that he calls home.

There is no way that one can analyze The Graveyard Book and its illustrations without considering the theory of adaptation, specifically the Theory of Adaptation by Linda

Hutcheon. Hutcheon “has a strong interest in intertextuality” (xii), her opinion being that works of any medium are both created and received by people and it is this human experience perspective that allows for the study of politics of intertextuality.

Adaptations are often considered as lesser works than the original. This perspective is also challenged by Hutcheon in her preface: “one lesson is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative” (xii). Hutcheon’s research challenges this view and allows for analysis on the subject of adaptation to continue and extend into academic circles in its own right. As has been discussed and corroborated by studies, (including this one), interviews and articles, The Graveyard Book was indeed inspired by and adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It would take much deeper analysis and comparison of the two novels together to investigate this particular avenue of adaptation. Let us therefore limit our investigation to The Graveyard Book itself and its accompanying illustrations. We have spoken at length about the reconstruction of form, specifically of Bod, Nobody Owens, and specifically on illustration. After all, what is illustration if not the earliest form of adaptation? This being noted, we can now extrapolate on the adaptations that take place in both Riddell and McKean’s renditions as well as that of the text.

Part Four:

McKean and Riddell

Dave McKean and Chris Riddell were brought into The Graveyard Book almost

simultaneously. Riddell joined through Bloomsbury Publishing in the U.K., while McKean

joined through HarperCollinsPublishing in the U.S.A, both in 2008. Although both

illustrators were working on adapting the same novel at the same time, their approaches and

final projects could not have been more different. Interestingly, Dave McKean also had a

history of collaboration with Gaiman through other novels and graphic novels, while this

McKean fig. 2

seems to be Riddell’s first interaction with the wily world of Neil Gaiman: “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” (McKean Version 3) For Dave McKean, this line insists on being taken with the gravest seriousness. On an inky page, the first page moreover, there really is a hand in the darkness, holding a knife. Searing into the eyes of the reader, the words stand out white on the page, floating evanescently, ghost-like in the sea of black. The subject, the knife held by a hand of unknown connection, sweeps the reader towards the next page, answering some questions, but raising far more.

Riddell Fig. 2

Chris Riddell, an imaginarian in his own right, sees something similar, but still with a different take. Instead of the line “there was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife,” he chooses, from the third paragraph down on the very first page of text, “The man Jack paused on the landing.”( Riddell Version 3) A long fingered exquisite fright of a man greets us in much the same jarring manner as Dave McKean’s “knife in the dark”, but this time we see not only the hand and the knife, but what that arm is attached to; The man Jack. Indeed, this is Riddell’s approach to all eight of his illustrative contributions, but we will get to those later. Riddell’s Jack is long; Long armed, long featured, long coat, long knife. His elongation adds to his ‘stretched’ quality, almost an embodied nightmare come to life, but only half remembered. His shadow looms, foreshadowing a hidden duality, or dual identity of the character, as well as suggesting a light source, even in the dark. Here Jack is all angles, a straightforward thing to be if one is a murderer, which indeed Jack is. Cross-hatched darkness adds detail and dimension to the stand-alone image. Each image is plainly bordered, barring

their captions, and is accompanied by a blank page on the left side, forcing the reader to shift identity and become for just a moment, a viewer. This presentation of illustration forces the viewer to make eye contact with the man Jack and look a piece of death in the eye.

Dave McKean’s images insist we turn the page to meet his Jack and to find out what

happens next. Lines and shapes misdirecting control, fit the off-kilter of events taking place

in the text surrounding the corresponding image. Jack is almost secondary to McKean’s

depictions of the house, the rug on the floor, giving way to the side table and only after the

eye has travelled do we find Jack, intrusive and half-formed.

McKean fig. 3

Halsall, indeed, in her analysis of Jack states “Jack’s presence in the text, however, is

just a nod to the convention of the villain in the sense that Bod’s murderer is structurally

needed to advance the novel’s mystery plot.” (342) McKean’s design of Jack is solid, to be

sure, but relegated to a corner, almost walking out of the frame and onto the next event. This forces events to keep flowing, allowing the reader, even as the image is consumed, to remain a reader.

McKean Fig. 3

Chris Riddell, a seasoned illustrator, is traditional in his approach to interpreting The

Graveyard Book in images. Dave McKean is arguably freer in his choice of style. Where

Riddell punctuates the narrative with still images, McKean interweaves his images with

Gaiman’s text. His illustrations are superimposed, floating under the text, adding to the sense of visual and textual continuity. Riddell’s work leans more towards introduction of individual characters and remains still, as a photo in a frame.

There is no continuous motion between his illustrations; instead the motion is captured dynamically within that illustrated frame. The fluidity of McKean’s interpretations adds to the textual subtleties and elusive explanations. A general sense of ‘not seeing the whole picture’ pervades both the narrative and McKean’s addition to the text, compelling the reader to turn the page.

As a basic comparison of these two illustrated adaptations, let’s imagine each interpretation as something more tangible. Riddell’s creations are like pieces of Lego. Each stands alone, very solid, a series of eight images present and in stasis. They are walled in by blankness, cut off from the text, barring the chosen quotes that act as captions that accompany the illustration. In contrast to this, McKean’s illustrations can be seen akin to finger painting. The expressiveness of the images zigzag with a divisive indistinction. There is intent if not cohesion behind each wisp of rendered smoke which gives off the illusion of movement. Namely, if one were to take McKean’s collective images for this text and paste them together, they would tell one consistent story. We could follow those zigzags and gestures as if we were walking through the graveyard itself. Riddell’s work, while masterful, would not achieve this effect. His images are separate from each other. They are building blocks, all introducing us to key plot points and characters, but they are penned in by the

border of their design. One Lego-brick by itself doesn’t build a model. One illustration alone isn’t telling a whole story.

It is very difficult to analyze the text without also looking at the illustrations in tandem, especially so for Dave McKean’s work. But let us try to look purely at the text anyway. Gaiman does not mind keeping his reader guessing. Chapter One, How Nobody

Came to the Graveyard, sets the scene but does not implicitly tell the reader what that scene will mean. Riddell gives a visual, a portrait, of the first encounter with the man Jack “paused on the landing” (Riddell Version 3).

McKean does not let the reader catch their breath. We are brought up short by the pitch black of the very first page, accompanied only by the first sentence: “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” (McKean Version 2-3 ) This is the first instance of

McKean’s visual perpetual motion. He maps out the scene so as to help carry the reader to the next action, even if the details are not present in the text. This is a sequentiality described by Björn Sundmark in his article The Verbal, The Visual, and the Very Young: A

Metacognitive Approach to Picturebooks. It is apparent “how each picture relates to the foregoing while anticipating the following (see also Sipe, 2011; Birkeland & Mjør, 2012).

Thus, a narrative movement is created. Each spread, each turn of the page creates a reading rhythm and direction, while the breaks in-between represent time lapses, from seconds to hours to days. Such ellipses create narrative time where the story can play out.” (17) By the same token, Gaiman’s text in conjunction with the illustrations provided by McKean can play on the reading time of the reader. This collaboration of image and text together create an unorthodox reading experience, half reading, half picturing and in so doing, comprehending a whole story. This being said, it is important to note as Sundmark points out, “Text and image

strive to support and reinforce each other. Obviously, however, there can never be a one to one correspondence since these are semiotic sign systems expressed through different modalities.” (17) But equally, by McKean’s mapping and Gaiman’s words, we are able to follow the action upon action sequence. “The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.” (McKean Version 7) This recurring theme of mist or fog, literally and literarily carries the reader and narrative through multiple pages. The mist adds to the sense of insubstantiality that helps create the ghostly scene in which Mistress

Owens first meets Bod as a baby. The theme is revisited at the very end as well, when

Mistress Owens says her final goodbye to her son.

Nobody Owens, when we first meet him, is just a baby, a yet untainted vessel taking us from one scene to the next. But he is also, from the first shot, identifiable as a sole survivor of the brutal triple murder of his family. This, in itself, is quite a feat in a children’s novel aimed at 8 to 11-year-olds. Yet, this information is presented unassertively and without condescension to its audience. As Nobody Owens, now nicknamed “Bod”, grows and is made aware of his troubled past, we are given the beginnings of formation, rather than outline of character. For the first six narrative years or so, Bod is a child that in many ways could be any child. He learns and makes mistakes like most of those his age.

We visually meet Riddell’s Bod, as stated previously, riding on the backs of the ghouls in chapter three. The ghouls here, are something akin to Jim Henson’s puppets in his

1986 Labyrinth, and veer almost out of frame, giving the impression that they are sweeping him off the page. Riddell gives Bod an expression of mingled surprise and alarm at his situation, but like McKean, has chosen not to depict the child in overt distress. Riddell’s

illustrations function greatly because the images depicted are not as alien to the eye as perhaps McKean’s abstract renditions. Riddell’s Bod is shown in the chapter three illustration, in his winding sheet and a general state of disarray. Night-gaunts circle above him as the ghouls scurry forth to Ghûlheim.

This aside, the reader may see him only one instance earlier than this chapter in

Riddell’s version. This happens before one has even opened the book, on the cover. A grave, grey-eyed preteen stares out at the world from a faded graveyard, fixing the viewer with an observant stare. In Art and Illusion, E.H. Gombrich muses on the construction of illustrated faces. He quotes from the 17th century critic Filippo Baldinucci:

Among painters (…) the word signifies a method of making portraits, in which they

aim at the greatest resemblance of the whole person portrayed, while yet, for the

purpose of fun, and sometimes of mockery, they disproportionately increase and

emphasize the defects of the features they copy, so that the portrait as a whole appears

to be the sitter himself, while its components are changed. (290)

Riddell aims at this resemblance of the “whole person” not out of mockery but out of simplification and for the sake of clarity. Bod is recognizable throughout the novel as a little boy, fully formed. He is not the abstract impression of a child given by McKean, he is not a shadow or half-ghost. Bod characterized by Riddell is simple, but solid. Gombrich states,

“Such sublime simplification is only possible on the basis of earlier complexities.” (280) In a way, we are able to recognize the images by Riddell because we as viewers have prior knowledge of what a face looks like. Riddell, an established caricaturist and political cartoonist, is practiced in the art of evoking full but simplified character in single images.

McKean meanwhile portrays one piece of the character at a time. McKean’s work is deceptive, the images presenting as much less complex than Riddell’s, a few dark dashes on a page, and not much more. Comparatively, Riddell’s attention to detail and recognizable 32

features seem at first glance much more challenging. But in reality, McKean’s illustrations are quite complex. In actuality, “The most astonishing fact about these clues of expression is surely that they may transform almost any shape into the semblance of a living being” (289). as Gombrich conveys. It almost doesn’t matter how abstract McKean dares go, we still see sense in his images.

Faces in illustration traditionally give us a sense of character, naturally because it gives us an image we can recognize and because illustrations are generally character or scene based. McKean, however, does not give us the direct recognizable features that Riddell does.

McKean’s Bod has the curves of eyes and nose, even an intended mouth, but the reader must fill in the gaps and construct the rest of the visual narrative through schematic data and with the text itself. The reader must build Bod themselves as they follow the story. This is even more prevalent in the proceeding chapter, chapter six, “Nobody Owens School Days”. Bod is shown sitting as he is described in the text, “Under the arch that separated the Egyptian walk and the northwestern wilderness beyond it from the rest of the graveyard and he read his book.” (McKean Version 174) While this scene is pastoral in its description, McKean’s interpretation is anything but. Bod looks lonely on the stone, his face tilted gravely and a little awkwardly over his book. It is almost as though McKean has drawn Bod from half- forgotten memory, foreshadowing Bod’s soon to be school day existence: “No one noticed the boy, not at first. No one even noticed that they hadn’t noticed him. He sat halfway back in class. He didn’t answer much, not unless he was directly asked a question and even then his answers were short and forgettable, colourless: He faded in mind and memory.” (PDF 81)

McKean seems to base his images on theme and directly pulls from the subtlety of Gaiman’s text.

McKean is able to do the most, with seemingly, the least. McKean’s works slithers in and out of focus, a followable haze. His images are superimposed with Gaiman’s text, 33

interweaving two interpretations of the narrative at once.

The mist, let in by the man Jack, beginning on page six, visually draws the reader all the way

to page nine. Throughout the Newbery Honor edition illustrated by Dave McKean, it

reappears, again on page 166 and 171, as steam from an ominous teacup. It is almost

immediately reimagined as the breeze surrounding Bod as he sits, in the illustration preceding

chapter six, Nobody Owens’ School Days, on page 174.

These wisps are not random. McKean intentionally draws his audience from page to page as

a narrative vessel surrounding the text and creating a recurring theme of insubstantial, yet

cohesive recurrence.

In Chapter Five, Danse Macabre, it is not that we merely get to see Bod’s face and recognize

him visually, as the protagonist of the story. McKean shows him in the half-light and half-

shadow, visualizing the internal battle and dual identity working away inside Bod. It is made

clear here textually, that although Bod dances as one of the living, he does not necessarily

think of himself as alive, “But I’m one of you.” [Bod says]

“Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.”

And Bod realized why he had danced as one of the living, and not as one of the crew that had

walked down the hill” (PDF 73) not as the dead with whom he has been raised. While he is

unmistakably the “live-boy” of the graveyard, there is a subtle yearning in Bod, not to be

dead exactly, but to be as the dead are. McKean is able to encapsulate this dichotomy while

also superseding the seriousness of this question of identity, of being and belonging, by

depicting the moment after Bod’s realization. “All thoughts of dancing were forgotten then,

and his fear was replaced with delight and with awe. It was the third time in his life that he

had seen it. “Look, Silas, it’s snowing!” he said, joy filling his chest and his head, leaving no

room for anything else. “It’s really snow!” (PDF 74) The theme is further softened by the 34

placement of the illustration, at the beginning of the chapter instead of at the end, allowing the viewer to make their own assumptions. As Gombrich states, “We respond to faces as a whole: we see friendly, dignified, or eager face, sad or sardonic long before we can tell what exact features or relationships account for this intuitive impression.” (282). Riddell repeatedly showcases the validity of his work by utilizing recognizability. One can see immediately that a character is a little boy or an adolescent girl (or ghost) and even get the inkling of a vampire. The illustrator must simply trust that the audience has seen them before and represent the character archetypes.

Part Five:

Conclusion

The Graveyard Book is a modern-day Book of Life, in the disguise of a ghost story for children. It is a story not of the dead, but of the value of living. As Gaiman himself re- iterates time and again in interviews and in specials, most recently in the back of his Newbery

Medal Edition for The Graveyard Book: “I wrote the sixth chapter, about Bod in school in chilly New Orleans, in a decrepit hotel. And I finished the book in my own gazebo at the bottom of the garden, wrote the last page of the novel blinking back stinging tears. I understood then, and only then, why I had not written the book as a young father. I had needed to walk the whole way with my children, to bring them up, to love them, and to learn that, at the end, you have to let them go.” (329)

As has been stated in the previous chapters, this novel is a labor of years, chiseled away at in the leftover minutes we never have to spare. It is also so much more than it was intended to be. It is the coagulation of human experience and relatable narrative, that allows for such tremendous adaptive measure to be taken, and to be understood.

It is the action upon action, suggested through a myriad of experiences that creates a narrative experience of this novel as a whole. It is the human experiential that has touched so many hearts through grief, image, age and growth. Gaiman, “did not write the stories to get people through the hard places and the difficult times,” (McKean Version 321) or to make readers of non-readers. But it is exactly the relationship with readers in hard places and difficult times and the text and images, that lead to the finished novel, The Graveyard Book as we know it today. The very things that make this novel what it is, would not have come to

fruition if Gaiman hadn’t had the experiences (for example) of fatherhood, spanning over 20 years, that he experienced.

Reimagining the Jungle Book full of ghosts was only the first step. Readers bring narrative home no matter what. Gaiman writes in his short composition Art Matters illustrated by Chris Riddell, “Fiction builds empathy. Fiction is something you build up from

26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks and you and you alone using your imagination create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You’re being someone else and when you return to your own world you’re going to be slightly changed.” On the very first page of Art Matters, Chris Riddell himself writes “I love the way words and pictures work together on a page. I have also noticed how when wise words have visuals added to them they seem to travel further online, like a paper aeroplane is catching an up draught.” It is in part this established relationship between the narrative with illustrations, interacting with imagination, that keeps the reader coming back for more, no matter their age or their skill level. When stories are told from multiple perspectives, with multiple audiences in mind, utilizing not just one narratological approach but several, they do, as Riddell says, “travel further”.

Nevertheless, what is the notable difference? In this investigation of home and identity in The

Graveyard Book in image and text, we have examined the shapes and functions of space in this novel and the value of places of thirdspace in a narrative. The graveyard itself offers a place of shelter, community and thirdspace as discussed in Part Two. But what if we consider the space outside the pages of The Graveyard Book? What is the interaction between readership, artisanship and the text? How does it adapt? Might we consider that adaptation itself is a form of thirdspace? Consider the following: We can define adaptation in

Hutcheon’s terms:

• An acknowledged transportation of re-organized other work or works

• A creative and interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging

• An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work

“Therefore, an adaptation is a deviation that is not derivative— a work that is second without being secondary” (4-5)

Continuing this line of thought, “Thirdspace too can be described as a creative recombination and extension, one that builds on the Firstspace perspective that is focused on the “real” material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through

“imagined” representations of spatiality” (6), according to Edward Soja. If we consider that our world/reality is basically one of Firstspace and the world/reality of Kipling’s Jungle

Book, is generally one of Secondspace, then adapted works such as The Graveyard Book itself and its accompanied illustrations find themselves essentially in a place of Thirdspace according to Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation and Soja’s placement of Thirdspace.

This suggestion of adaptation as a Thirdspace perhaps answers in part, the intrigue of what keeps readers coming back for more. Potentially, this could also lead to further research in the fields of adaptation and thirdspace. “Part of this,” Hutcheon argues, “comes simply from repetition with variation from the comfort of ritual combined with piquancy of surprise” (4). We want to see the same things we’ve seen before, but we want it to be slightly different the second, third, or fourth time around. In a way it is because our cognition changes with each viewing, as Gaiman himself expresses in his Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech,

“Writers tell stories and think they mean one thing; Readers take the stories into their own lives and they mean something else” (329-330). As remarked upon in the introduction of this investigation, Linda Hutcheon’s view on adaptation still holds true: “Recognition and

remembrance are part of the pleasure and risk of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change” (4).

It is the opinion of this investigation of being and belonging, that it is indeed this combination of recurring narrative in new and shifting forms, adapted into a new space, visual, textual or both, that keeps this narrative alive. The theme of The Graveyard Book is recognizable by any age because it has equally existed before as a previous work or form, and it can also be completely new to a fresh audience. It survives because it can adapt.

Works Cited:

Primary Works:

Gaiman, Neil. The Graveyard Book. Harper Collins, 2008.

—The Graveyard Book. Riddell, Chris, Bloomsbury, 2014.

—The Graveyard Book. McKean, Dave, HarperCollins, PDF, 2008

Secondary works:

Campbell, Hayley, and Audrey Niffenegger. The Art of Neil Gaiman. Harper Design, an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers, 2014.

Dalmaso, R. (. 1. )., and H. (. 2. ). Madella. “The Many Graveyard Books: Artistic

Collaborations and Possible Multiple Readings in Illustrated Works.” Ilha Do

Desterro, vol. 71, no. 2, pp. 57–73.

EBSCOhost, doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2018v71n2p57. Accessed 13 Feb. 2020.

Gaiman, Neil. Art Matters. Headline Publishing Group, 2018

Giovanelli, Marcello. “Construing the Child Reader: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the Opening

to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 49, no. 2,

June 2018, pp. 180–195. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s10583-016-9285-3.

“E.H. Gombrich's 'Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation',”, vol.

151, no. 1281, 2009, pp. 836–839. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40601264.

Halsall, Alison. Nobody’s Home: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Its Visual Adaptations.

Vol. 1, no. 3, 2017, pp. 334–353. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/ink.2017.0023.

Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. [Electronic Resource]. 2nd ed.,

Routledge, 2013. EBSCOhost,

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Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. Great Britain, Wordsworth Editions Limited. 2018

Lee, D. “The Politics of Fairyland: Neil Gaiman and the Enchantments of Anti- Bildungsroman.”

Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 57, no. 5, pp. 552– 564. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1080/00111619.2016.1138444. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press. Kindle

Edition. 2015

McStotts, Jennifer. The Jungle, the Graveyard and the Feral Child: Imitating and

Transforming Kipling Beyond Pastiche McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Kindle Edition.

Soja, W. Edward. Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, The

Trialtectics of Spatiality. Blackwell Publishing, 1996

Sundmark, Björn. “The Verbal, The Visual, and the Very Young: A Metacognitive Approach to

Picturebooks.” Acta Didactica Norge, no. 2, 2018. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5617/adno.5642.

Sutton, Roger. “It’s Good to Be Gaiman: A Revealing Interview with Newbery Winner Neil

Gaiman.” School Library Journal, vol. 55, no. 3, Mar. 2009, pp. 30–32. EBSCOhost,

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