Hi friends,
It’s been a spring full of slow days, settling back into home after book tour, noodling around on future project ideas, and spending time with my family. I’ve missed communicating with you all more often!
The big news today is that THE BRITISH ARE COMING: THE GRAPHIC EDITION Vo. 1 is now on sale everywhere books are sold! And it’s an Amazon Best History Book of June.
My role in this project was a bit different than my other books. I was the adapter, which means I transformed the incredible Pulitzer Prize winning author Rick Atkinson’s narrative history of the first years of the American revolution, The British are Coming, into a graphic novel script. It’s tricky because somehow I have to distill down an 800 (!!) page book full of rich detail and rigorous history into two 172-page graphic novels which have very limited room for words on each page. As you can imagine, I rely a lot on the incredible illustrations from Federico Pietrobon, to communicate the scenery and emotion and action of each scene. Consider, for example, the opening scene of the Boston Tea Party. Rick’s original book sets the scene this way, snippet from the online edition:
I started off the book with a full-page illustration to set the scene, a wide-view of the harbor, with the relevant location and date information, and the outsized sound effects to show something is coming…
Then, the next pages are more of a traditional graphic novel format. But there are still very few words. The first panel includes a newspaper excerpt to provide additional context. The next page includes the actual quotes from the real historical figures which Rick quotes in the prose version.
Then notice how I incorporated the value of the tea as a little aside with the narrow? That’s a neat fun fact, I think, but really it’s a way of me telling the reader that THIS IS TEA if they missed it, and that this is the Boston Tea Party, without coming right out and saying it.
In other places, I designed new infographics or other visual ways of showing data, lists, locations, and more. For example, later in the book I wrote out this simple graphic as a way to show the real depths of the Americans’ gunpowder shortage. The statistic didn’t mean much to me, that they only had 15 tons of gunpowder, but I think this made the shortage clearer.
I really love this work because it engages every part of my brain– analytical, academic, visual, creative, narrative, and so on. I think reading the book also feels that way– an immersive experience that teaches you as it entertains you! The book is also designed for all ages, from young reader (though there is some gore to be aware of) through adults.
It was also such an honor to be trusted with Rick’s work, which I have long admired. This is Vol. 1 of the two volume adaptation; Vol. 2 will come next year, I believe. It’s available in both paperback and hardback now!
And if you’re not convinced yet, you can find a different excerpt scene on the School Library Journal’s website here.
Happy reading!
