Why adapt The Great Gatsby into a graphic novel?

You have to really love a story in order to spend the huge amount of time and energy it takes to bring it to life as a graphic novel. However, there are many stories I love that I do not think are suited to the graphic novel format. 

In order for a book to be worth being adapted into a graphic novel, the graphic novel should give you something that the prose version cannot give you. 

The obvious element that lends The Great Gatsby to a graphic novel interpretation is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lush visual descriptions, full of colors and beautiful details. For example, 

“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

I love Fitzgerald’s gorgeous visual descriptions, and that’s certainly one of the main reasons I’ve returned to The Great Gatsby again and again since I first read it in highschool. However, what really excited me in relation to making it into a graphic novel was Fitzgerald’s use of metaphors.  

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.”

I chose to interpret that description literally in my graphic novel—I show Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan floating in the air high above the sofa. Another example is when Fizgerald compares party-guests to moths, I give the guests wings and show them flying  through the air. When a movie star is compared to an orchid, I draw her as an orchid. 

This is both a literal and surreal interpretation which works in Gatsby’s world. Jay Gatsby, and the extravagant and obsessive world he inhabits, is broken from reality. And, thankfully, illustration is a medium that is not bound by the usual laws of physics which makes it uniquely suited to this type of interpretation.

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