The Great Gatsby’s long march to the public domain ended last year, and with its conclusion, so too ended any scrap of capitalist restraint. Not since the novel’s military edition was printed in 1945 has the novel had such an overwhelming push to market. Currently flooding the shelves are dozens of Gatsby and Gatsby-adjacent publications; Gatsby is to come to both stage and screen, will be overseen by major pop music icons; there has even, delightfully, been an Itch.io game jam.
There will be no less than three separate graphic novel adaptations by the end of the year.
That puts Ted Adams and company – whose Kickstarter ends next Monday – on unsteady ground. Sure, that Kickstarter has far surpassed its meager $2,500 goal (it is, at time of writing, sitting pretty at nearly ten times that figure), but this is the Great American Novel we’re talking about. Something has kept the novel an enduring classic for nearly a hundred years (and not just its perhaps unjustly damning ubiquity in high school English classes). Those driven to undertake the hard work of adaptation must want to produce exceptional, equally timeless works of art, right?
It seems unlikely; so many of the products being foisted on the public during what The New York Times is calling ‘The Gatsby Glut’ seem like overeager cash grabs, an attempt for everyone to pick up some of the financial benefit long hoarded by Scribner, the novel’s lone publisher since its initial release.
Adams and artist Jorge Coelho’s book, thankfully, feels less like profit hunt than an endearing act of celebration. Where many adaptations of classic literature may fail to capture the inner light of its source, this adaptation somehow finds a way to distill that light, to capture just the right moments and just the right smirking humor without capsizing under the novel’s whole.
The problem with Gatsby is an imperceptible balance, a humor-to-insight ratio that a new reader might not catch; without context, it’s dreadfully easy to read these characters and narrative as sincere. Rich ennui smacks a lot less ironically in a post-1% world, one in which the American Dream has been nearly done away with. We are no soldiers in foxholes, dreaming of a better life: we are financial crisis hustlers, overworked and exhausted by Tik Tok Cryto Bros and their unending Tom Buchanan braggadocio.
Luckily, Adams and Coelho announce the irony as pointedly as possible, picking Nick Harroway’s most telling insights and stings as their continuing caption boxes. When Tom’s frank racism announces itself over the dinner table, it’s undermined by Daisy’s subtle mockery. When overwhelmed by booze-soaked revelry, Nick tellingly highlights its worst aspects.
The book does an impressive work of adaptation—what is left out doesn’t feel missed, what is included never feels overly wrought. While Nick’s captions are precise and telling, they are never overly verbose in the way a novel must, by its very nature, be. I’ve read issues of Batman more heavy-handed and interested in their own prosody.
It doesn’t hurt that the artwork is immaculate – that the spaces between the prose are as airy and beautiful as this careless wealth is described as being. Coehlo’s draftsmanship is strikingly exact; there are no misplaced lines, no cluttered frames. Each panel feels perfectly balanced, exactly populated. Not only do our characters feel impossibly elegant, so too does their world. Objects, furniture, grand ballrooms, all of these are rendered with stylistic flair.
Backing all this up are the powerful, expressive colors by Coehlo and compatriot Inês Amaro, which capture a range from candyland dream to dusky boozehound. While sometimes inaccurate—occasionally the colorists seem to rebuke the text itself, rendering ‘straw-colored’ hair dark brown, or coloring a dress yellow when it is expressly stated to be white – it is almost always emotionally correct.
In all these ways and more, The Great Gatsby – The Essential Graphic Novel manages not just to capture but to elevate a sensibility other adaptations have reached for (and quite spectacularly muddled). It’s a book that doesn’t set out to replace your beaten copy of Gatsby from high school, but it might very well remind you to give that thing a much-deserved new reading.
In such a way, this is a book that will stand out in the coming static of Gatsby pretenders, a true celebration of a classic rather than a garish replication.
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