I once read a “graphic interpretation” of The Scarlet Letter that took the opposite approach I kept expecting Hester Prynne (whose scarlet letter wasn’t so much an A as a double D) to burst out of her sensible smock and lay waste to the village with her heat vision. Hyman makes the wise decision to drain almost all the color and motion out of these pages.

The story is rendered in simple, straightforward, almost photographic panels, and the characters all look like convincingly foursquare denizens of the 1950s – just exactly the kind of people Jackson hated and loved to torment in her fiction. Hell, they don’t even talk that much.īut Hyman’s artwork saves the day. They’re not sworn to save a world that hates and fears them. After all, until the story’s violent climax, the whole thing consists of a bunch of people standing around talking. The stark, elegant simplicity of Jackson’s story seems at first glance like a poor fit to the medium of a comic book (unless by “comic book” you mean something like Lesbian Croatian Cancer Survivors, which was spottily written and ineptly drawn by angry, talentless grievance monsters who’ve been working on the second issue since 2007 I don’t). “The Lottery” does none of that – it is a no-nonsense, largely hermetic structure, words joined with a jeweler’s precision. Some books sprawl and dream and carry on in ways that seem to invite imagery in spades. The story is such a perfect apparatus that it leaves little room for meddling. Our book today is a “graphic adaptation,” what once would have been known as an “illustrated classic,” of Shirley Jackson’s best-known little piece of work, “The Lottery.” It’s Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery: A Graphic Adaptation, done with marvelous restrained mastery by Miles Hyman, Shirley Jackson’s grandson, who opens the production with a few remarks about the trickiness of adapting what he calls a “family heirloom”:įor me, as an artist who has spent much of his professional life adapting novels and stories into graphic form, it would stand to reason that my grandmother’s harrowing tale should entice over the years – not only because … it had become a sort of family heirloom but because of how precise and nuanced the adaptation of this powerful piece of fiction would have to be to succeed.

The lottery graphic novel