First things first: THIS IS NOT FINISHED ART. This is a very very rough draft. Please don’t judge the art as if it were meant for publication, okay?
For a couple of years around 2010, I put A LOT of work into a graphic-novel adaptation of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer. My goal was to adapt the entirety of the Book of the New Sun series. What hubris! An abandoned comic series of Shadow of the Torturer already exists, published by Innovation. I suppose it was abandoned due to low sales, but I don’t know. Somehow I thought I could do better.
I made a rough draft of 4 chapters and sent a copy to Mr. Wolfe. I do not know if he ever saw it. I hold no ill-will there. Through the grapevine I’d heard he was going through a very rough time. Sending a rough draft to the writer and not his agent was probably pretty dumb.
It became clear to me that I couldn’t work on it any more without having some form of permission. I’d already put about 2 years of design and research into it. It was only sometime later that I came to the understanding that this book should definitely NOT be made into a graphic-novel. It’s the wrong format. It would be longer than the actual novels. It would be doing this excellent work of literature a disservice. If you’ve read Wolfe, this probably goes without saying. His writing is so slippery that almost 40 years later, people who’ve read the books multiple times still argue about what is even happening at the basic plot level. Beyond the basic plot, the symbolism is so layered and multifaceted that it would not survive translation. There is a delicious ambiguity in the text, framed as a translation from a language not yet invented, that illustrating things one way would obviate the other possibilities inherent in the text. I’m not kidding. People read these books and come up with diametrically opposed readings. Anything that removes that by solidifying one reading harms Wolfe’s intent.
The focus of these pages it to figure out what needs to happen on each page, in each panel, and each caption before worrying about aesthetics. I drew all these pages on a first generation iPad with a crayon like rubber stylus at a time when I hadn’t been drawing people or landscapes in a while. I always draw, but the decade previous had pulled me more into design and so my comic drawing chops were very rusty. This art is more elaborate than a rough draft would or should normally be. Mostly this is because I was trying to also see what could be done with an iPad. This was back when making art on a mobile tablet was a novel and awkward thing. So, yeah, I got more carried away than I should have. The last few pages are closer to what one might expect from a rough draft. Some of these scrawlings hurt for me to look at. Please keep in mind that my focus was on the adaptation of the narrative, not yet the particular renderings as you read it.
The text captions contain as much Wolfe as I could fit. I made some excisions and because of that had to insert some of my own words to bridge the gaps that developed. I did as little of that as possible. One of the inherent problems is that it’s really difficult to make any cuts without losing some amazing writing, some integral clue or some subtle symbolism. I wanted to allow, in as much as possible in a graphic novel, the ambiguity and richness of Wolfe’s writing. I was assisted in these excruciations on the text by the always generous Jordon Flato, who I also thank for introducing me to the Book of the New Sun.
I’m probably on shaky legal ground by putting this out for public consumption here. Please understand this is not a commercial publication. I’m sharing this as an archive of a project that was a very huge part of my life for a while and I’m not trying to steal or pirate Wolfe’s work. I stand in awe of it. If anything, I hope this will make you go out and buy a copy of his book for yourself or someone you think would love it. It truly is a Book of Gold.
Please don’t sue me. Please enjoy.