Graphic Gatsby: K. Woodman-Maynard on adapting a classic for comics
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, “The Great Gatsby,” turns 100 Thursday. Since its release, the book has become a staple of high school English classes and has inspired numerous adaptations, including a Broadway musical and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film.
In early 2021, just as the book entered the public domain, Minnesota graphic novelist K. Woodman-Maynard published her adaptation. MPR News arts reporter Jacob Aloi visited her Minneapolis home studio to talk about her creative process and what the Gatsby legacy means to her.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
This adaptation of ‘The Great Gatsby’ is your first published graphic novel. Why did you choose it?
First of all, I love the story, but I also don’t believe that every book is suited for adaptation. So, when I was looking at adapting a book, I read a couple that I liked, that were favorites, because it takes like 1,500 hours for me to adapt a graphic novel.
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So, you really have to love the source material ... It was the metaphors and the figurative language [in “Gatsby”] that were so over the top and visually beautiful, and that was what drew me to adapting it, where I felt like, ‘Oh, I could literally depict these metaphors, like the women floating in the air,’ because the graphic novel medium really allows for that.
So, I really wanted to use the graphic novel medium to its full potential. And I felt like “Gatsby” allowed me to do that.
Your style in the book is not quite abstract, but there are certainly elements in it that are not literal. Why is that the style that you gravitate towards?
I felt like it helps readers better understand the metaphors and the language, especially from a teaching perspective. I feel like it allows readers to better understand those things.
So, it wasn’t like I was inventing it. It was all there, but I just felt like it added another layer to the book. And “Gatsby” itself is so over the top in a lot of ways, with the language, with the parties, with the characters, that I felt like it worked with that story.
What were some of the things that you learned while working on this that you’ve brought into other work?
I learned a lot about what a reader would understand or what would confuse them, and I think my publisher was good about pointing those out to me.
In “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald references a character as being “ghostlike,” and I just wanted to draw him as faint and transparent. And the [publisher was] like, “This is gonna really confuse [readers].”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s language is so beautiful, so it was hard to decide what to cut or what to keep.
In order to keep more of his language, I ended up writing it like into the clouds or wrapped around a tree or in a shadow ... instead of just big blocks of text. That’s a treatment that I just kind of developed for this book, and now I’ve kept doing it throughout all my other work.
Could you speak a little bit about the legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald?
What drew me to it was all the themes about status and class and materialism. And I feel like that’s why it has such an impact, you know, still, because those are kind of universal themes. And I feel like, especially in America, we're dealing with that now, and we’ve dealt with that in the past
I think those are why it sticks around and why it interests so many people. As well as the allure of the luxury and the money, but also the fact that things don’t turn out well for Gatsby. Even though he achieves all of this wealth and power, he still doesn’t get what he wants, which I feel like is kind of a reassuring message, in a way, for those of us who aren’t fabulously wealthy.
