The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel Book Review

Sometimes it's not enough for our favorite stories to only exist in black text on a white page. Maybe that's why we take to the big screens, and try to adapt them for movies or television. I can tell you now, after reading The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel that that is the wrong route. This stunning and faithful graphic novel adaptation of the beloved text is absolutely life-changing. Aya Morton and Fred Fordham brought Fitzgerald's text and characters to life within the pages of this novel. Each scene and moment was painstakingly rendered into beautiful images with perfectly concise text additions. If you are an avid fan of Fitzgerald's best known work, or picking up this lovely and heartbreaking story for the first time, I can assure you that you will absolutely fall in love with The Great Gatsby (all over again!).  

F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and for the next decade the couple lived in new York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald's novels include The Beautiful and the Damned and Tender Is the Night. he died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald's fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. Aya Morton is the award-winning illustrator of His Dream of the Skyland, the first book in a trilogy written by Anne Opotowsky. She has worked as a freelance artist in London and Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband and two sons. Fred Fordham has written and illustrated for various publications, most recently adapting and illustrating the graphic novel version of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. He also illustrated Philip Pullman's debut graphic novel, The adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship. He lives in London. 

First published in 1925, The Great Gatsby has been acclaimed by generations of readers and is now reimagined as a stunning graphic novel. Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, and the rest of the unforgettable cast are rendered in vivid and evocative illustrations by artists Aya Morton. The iconic text has been artfully distilled by adapted Fred Fordham. Blake Hazard, F. Scott Fitzgerald's great-granddaughter, contributes a personal introduction to the work. This quintessential Jazz Age tale stands as the supreme achievement of Fitzgerald's career and is a true classic of twentieth-century literature. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy is exquisitely captured in this enchanting edition. 

I am very protective of The Great Gatsby because it's the book that got me into analyzing texts. Before I read Gatsby, I didn't understand why reading texts for school, analyzing passages, and dissecting sentences was necessary, despite my already cemented love for reading. But when I read Gatsby for the first time, everything changed. I felt like I was able to understand why texts withstood the passage of time, why stories were so important, and how we can learn from characters who made mistakes in fiction a hundred years ago. The text of The Great Gatsby is eternally important to me, and Fred Fordham did a fabulous job adapting it to this graphic novel. The best, stunning, and most recognizable lines are, of course, still there. Gatsby wouldn't be Gatsby without the "In my younger and more vulnerable years" or "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." But it's not just those lines that are integral to our understanding of Gatsby as a masterpiece. We have to understand Nick as a character, his "entanglement" back home, his birthday moment, and everything that makes him the craziest narrator we've ever met. We have to understand Daisy, and Tom, and Myrtle, and Gatsby -- and with less text than we are usually granted. While the images helped (which I will talk about later!), the choice of adaptation, the ways in which the chosen language cemented what we saw in the drawings (or contrasted with them) was well done. I really can't imagine this graphic novel reading any other way. The chosen language stays faithful to all the important themes of time, love, the American dream, revenge, while also transferring some it its power to the visuals. 

The artwork is absolutely stunning. Each turn of the page brings a whole new sensory experience, and adds to our layered understanding of Gatsby as a text. Not only are the characters portrayed beautifully, but the scenes themselves are outstanding. Specific moments that take up entire pages are just as important and incredible as smaller panels with minute details. Aya Morton is clearly talented, and also dedicated and familiar with the text of Gatsby. The pivotal moments of the book are brought out so clearly, where we are forced to linger and think about what just happened. Certain images (of cars, of speed, of flowers, of Daisy playing with her pearls) become motifs, and recognizable as the pages progress. One of my favorite spreads is the one where Nick is drunk with Tom, Myrtle, Catherine, and the McKees. Everything swirls around him in one large haze, and leading up to it, the images get fuzzier. I love the chapter introduction pages, because they also include important images, which demand to be paid attention to as the book moves closer to its fated ending. At first, I wondered why the colors felt so muted--this is a Jazz Age graphic novel, and I expected bright lights and sharp lines and stark images, but what we got is so much better. Because Nick is basically remembering this story, looking back on this time of his life when he is older, everything is profoundly touched by memory. That's why it makes sense that the colors are softer and not as vibrant, and why all the images seem rounder and fuller. Everything is perfect and soft in memory, and Morton does a fabulous job bringing that idea to life with her images. I was truly immersed within the pages of this text, and I could not put it down, in large part because the drawing were so fascinating, detailed, and a vehicle for foreshadowing. 

I mentioned earlier how The Great Gatsby was the book I read that piqued my analyzation interest. A large part of that was when I hit chapter 5, where the themes of time and time lost and time to be had are profound and apparent. It was so important to me that The Graphic Novel would get this correct, because time is one of my favorite points about The Great Gatsby to cite or analyze. And, of course, the text adaptation and images in the graphic novel got it 100% right. To say that Morton and Fordham nailed it wouldn't be enough. Right at the beginning of chapter five, there's an emphasis on the lateness of the night, and the perfect time for tea. Within the next few pages, Morton highlights Gatsby's obsession with his watch, the clocks in the room, and Gatsby's impatience by checking both of them. When Gatsby and Daisy get in the room together for the first time in years, there's always a clock in the background. Nick's lines reminding Gatsby that he's acting like a "little boy" are perfect, because they also focus on how some acts are only appropriate for certain-aged people. Even though we don't get the constant repetition of phrases like "after half an hour" or "in a few seconds" and the other time-related phrases that make this chapter what it is, there's still a heavy emphasis on the passage of time through the images and the selected text. All the way to the last panel in this chapter, we have mentions of time, and how time affects all things. It's very profoundly and beautifully adapted, in both text and visuals. There are, of course, more mentions and images of time throughout the novel (the songs, especially, are such an interesting and subtle avenue to exploring it!), but I was very pleased that chapter five was depicted as our introduction to time as an integral character. 

One of my favorite motifs are the white daisies, which are usually found on blue water-like backgrounds. Not only are these images visually pleasing, and probably some of the most gorgeous images in the book, but they crop up at the most key moments. The first time we see this image is when Daisy mentions her "white Louisville girlhood." This is important to our understanding that that "girlhood" is something Daisy associates with Gatsby, and with innocence and love. The second time we see this motif is when Jordan and Nick meet for coffee, and Jordan is telling Daisy's and Gatsby's love story, as she sees it. Then, it comes again when Nick is telling Gatsby's origin story, and we see the daisy images at the end when Daisy and Gatsby first catch one another's eyes. It's very interesting how, so far, the imagery has shown up when other people describe Daisy's and Gatsby's stories, rather than the two of them mentioning it themselves. Finally, the daisy imagery comes when Gatsby is reliving a pivotal moment in his life. When he flashes back and remembers the first moment he kissed Daisy, and when he thought he saw his future in her, there are two full-page spreads embrace this imagery and the blue/white color scheme. In contrast, a few pages later, there are large portions of pages dedicated to Gatsby's last moments with Daisy, and his search for her when he got back from the war. However, even though large portions are dedicated to these moments, they are actually small panels surrounded by a lot of white space. It begins to show how this dream of Daisy really put Gatsby in a box his whole life, how this singular dream took up all of his multitudes. The last place we see the daisy motif is on the last page spread, with the infamous words "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." If you blink, you'll miss it: Daisy's face and daisies are floating within the surface of the water, in all white, surrounded by the dark water. It's no mistake that Gatsby died in his pool and that the white daisy imagery is contrasted with dark blue. I encourage you to analyze the meanings of the colors, the moments, and the importance of all these together when reading The Graphic Novel, because it makes for a truly rich and immersive experience, one where you'll feel like you understood the text in a whole new and different light. 

I read this graphic novel twice before I felt confident in conveying my love for it through this review. I highly recommend it to everyone who needs a good story right now, one that encapsulates all the important themes from its original, and then expand our understanding of the characters and their complicated lives and world-views. If you loved Aya Morton's visuals as much as I do, go check out her illustrations in His Dream of the Skyland. If you also loved Fred Fordham's textual adaptation, check out his adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. And if you just loved this story and adaptation so much, I highly recommend rereading it -- you'll never know what you find on a second read!

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*