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

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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. She describes a scene late in the story to demonstrate, when Offred, the narrator, "thinks of bodies she's seen hanging on the wall. 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. My hope was to not just show the story with pictures, but to capture the spirit of the novel," she says.

In this case, the reader is cued to understand the “bad thing” as the terrifying news blaring out of the television. Oddly, the only thing that is older and less beautiful in the graphic novel than in the TV adaptation is the Commander. The book is striking to look at inside and out, a testament to the impact that good cover design can have.You can have a life or you can do some writing, but not both at once, because although life may be the subject of writing, it is also the enemy. Her early process started before the first season of Hulu's show aired, and she purposefully avoided the series from thereon out. 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.

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. 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. But that doesn't mean she found The Handmaid's Tale any less inspiring — in fact, the novel's text inspired Nault so much that she began sketching as soon as she started reading. Their newest recruit, a psychologist named Adam, suggests, ‘The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind.Since the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, this narrative, described in terms ranging from provocative, startling, and prophetic to simply terrifying, has spread from text to film to television and now to graphic novel. 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.

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.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.

Canadian artist Renée Nault is responsible for both the work it took to adapt The Handmaid’s Tale into graphic novel format and the entirety of the art, a clear labor of love. 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. The feeling is that even now, in telling her own story, June is being presented for consumption rather than understanding and warning.The hardcover edition is a matte black with stark white and red lettering and the small red figure of protagonist Offred, and it sets the stage beautifully for the story inside. 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. It’s frequently difficult to tell June and Ofglen apart, let alone the second Ofglen from the first. 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. It’s a choice that misses the purpose of the book entirely and robs the tale of its heft, suffering the same failures as last year’s terrible Jane Eyre adaptation.