Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece “Slaughterhouse-Five” is coming to a comic store near you, now in graphical, pictorial form thanks to the stellar team of Ryan North and Albert Monteys (with color assists by Ricard Zaplana.) Before tracking your copy down and experiencing Vonnegut’s anti-war story for the first time or anew, Ryan graciously let me ask him some questions about the processes of adapting the novel into comics, keeping the themes alive, and the dark, dark humor of it all.
I assure you, by the end of this interview you’ll come away with two thoughts: Tranlfamadorians were built for comics and the word adaptation loses all meaning after saying it more than three times (so it goes.)
Let’s start at the beginning, or the first slice as the Tralfamadorians might say. Was “Slaughterhouse-Five” something you approached Archaia about wanting to adapt? Were you tapped for it? Basically, when and how the heck did this project come about?
My understanding was that Archaia did all the work of meeting with the Vonnegut estate and working out the deal, and when that was sorted they asked me, very slyly, if I liked Kurt Vonnegut. And of course I wrote back right away with a “yes!! He’s my favourite. Why?” and then we took it from there. And the words “took it from there” cover a lot – it’s an absolutely terrifying book to adapt – you don’t want to be the person who messes up Vonnegut – and it was a huge challenge but also a joy and unbelievably satisfying project. And it turned out so great, so gorgeous, so moving. (I can say that because I just adapted it: Vonnegut wrote the prose novel and Albert turned it into comics, so it feels like even more of a collaboration than comics usually does. And this has the side effect of when people say the book is good I feel like I can say “Oh my God, RIGHT??” instead of a demure and modest thank-you.)
This is your longest single piece of comics work, although you have previously done novel-length projects like “Romeo And/Or Juliet” or “How to Invent Everything” and the “Squirrel Girl” graphic novel for Marvel. How different was this process, if it was? Was the fact that it was a straight adaptation rather than working within someone else’s world a factor?
Yeah, it helped that it was an adaptation for sure – I knew, for example, who the characters were and what the plot would be, which let me focus 100% of my efforts on making it into the best possible comic book version of that. The goal was to make it feel at home in the medium, so if someone had somehow never heard of Vonnegut, they’d think “oh what a cool comic!” and not “oh what a weird photocopied version of a book with some pictures added!”. The actual process of writing the comics script felt the same as it normally does – you’re always looking for the best way to show things visually, to take full advantage of the page and the fact you know when the reader is turning it – but it was as if someone had already done half the work, plotted the whole thing out with incredibly complete scene descriptions. It’s still a transformative work, of course, and not as straightforward as that maybe sounds, but it felt, at the end of the day, like writing comics.
You’ve talked about the anxiety of adapting a classic work into comics before. Were there points in the process that you had to fight putting your own voice too much into the work or the reverse, relying too heavily on Vonnegut’s prose to the detriment of a different medium?
That was my fear: I wanted to avoid the comic being “here’s the book text in narration boxes, and here’s a picture showing you what the book is talking about” – that’s not so much an adaptation into a new medium as it is just distorting the old medium to fit. Honestly – and other writers will back me up on this – one of the challenges in reading Vonnegut is that afterwards you want to write like him: his prose is so clear, so direct, and you don’t want to plagiarize. So it actually felt freeing to be able to read Slaughterhouse again, really throw myself into it, study it, make notes on what I wanted to do… and then get to write exactly like him and not worry about it. There are places where it’s words I wrote to feel like Kurt, and there are places where it’s all Kurt’s original words, and I think (and hope!) that you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. That’s the goal!
Continued belowWere there passages from “Slaughterhouse-Five” that, despite loving, you found you could not find a way to adapt?
Oh tons – prose is more dense than comics, at least in terms of word count, so there are always things that don’t make it in. I tried to include all of what I call “wham lines:” the lines that stay with you long after you read, the ones that make you put down the book and stare off into space, or just laugh. There was only one that didn’t fit: when Billy is on the train, on the boxcar, self-crucified in the corner, and he coughs. The book reads
Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction.
Then there’s a paragraph break, and then a paragraph all on its own:
This can be useful in rocketry.
It’s devastating and funny and delivered like a punchline, but it’s also so sad, and Billy is so helpless and hopeless, and the whole scene is bleak. I still remember the first time I read Slaughterhouse-Five, sitting in a car in a parking lot, putting the book down because that line hit me so hard. And while there’s ways that it could be put into comics, none of them worked in the scene as it was on the page, and I didn’t want to do a version of it that was lesser. So that line stayed out, and it’s the only one of the wham lines that did.
You’ve said in other interviews that you tried to imagine this version of “Slaughterhouse Five’’ as if it began life as a comic and made changes accordingly. Which parts of the original were the hardest to translate over and which were the easiest? Any you found joyous in the move?
One of the hardest I actually laughed at, because it felt like Kurt was playing a trick on me across time and space. There’s the emotional climax of Derby – and spoiler alert for the book and comic here, of course – where he delivers this wonderful, moving speech defending America. Kurt writes,
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after an, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now.
He lumbers to his feet for the finest moment in his life, and delivers this speech – and then Kurt doesn’t tell us what he says. That was the joke. That was how he pranked me. Kurt tells us what Derby talks about and some of the images he uses and how it’s this really moving speech, but the speech itself is left to our imagination. And of course, that technique works like gangbusters in prose, but in comics, you see the character standing there and you want to see what he says. It would feel like a cheat to have a narration box tell you the gist of it when he’s right there ready to say it. So I had to write this moving speech, in Kurt’s voice, so that it would fit perfectly into the existing description of the speech while still (hopefully) being as powerful as described. That was hard, but I also really loved the process and that moment of closeness with the author.
Others were easier: there’s a Tralfamadorian book in the novel that’s read by Billy, and it’s described as these short paragraphs describing scenes, each one separate, unrelated to the others, but taken all at once communicating something about the world. And right away I realized, heck, Kurt could basically be describing comics here: images put together to say something more than they say alone. So the Tralfamadorian book became a Tralfamadorian comic in our adaptation, which I liked the meta-joke of, and it fit with the other changes we made (primarily, that Kilgore Trout is now not only a failed novelist, but a novelist that has failed so badly that now he’s writing comics). Trout’s comics are some of my favourite sequences in the book, and Albert did just such an incredible job on them. So the Tralfamadorian book done as a double-page spread, so you can hold this Tralfamadorian book in your hands, study the images, and see the world as they do, the smallest and most subtle book-within-a-book in a comic filled with them.
Continued belowTell us a little about the process of working with the book’s artist, Albert Monteys, in general and specifically in conveying the strangeness of linear and non-linear time in “Slaughterhouse Five.”
Basically our process is he’d take my scripts and make them incredible. He’s been a dream to work with, elevating everything on the page and adding in his own ideas that just make the whole thing better. There’s a sequence – now one of my favourites – where Billy and Derby sneak some nutritious slurry while they’re working at Slaughterhouse-Five. He coloured it so the food was orange, and when it lands on their tongues they turn orange too, just for that panel, and it works like crazy. It’s a way of telling that story that can only be done in comics, and it’s 100% Albert. It’s so good. HE’S so good.
As for conveying the strangeness of the book, I worked out where (and when) each scene was taking place so he’d know which version of Billy to draw there, and tried to include reference photos wherever I could. Again, writers have the easy job in comics, so the least I could do was find photo ref wherever I could!
I love the way the opening pages position the reader within the narrative, providing clarity and context to a narrative that could easily become unclear without undercutting the disorienting experience of being unstuck in time with Billy but I have to ask: why purple for transitions between times and not alternating red/purple depending on the direction of the time slippage? Or am I misremembering how doppler shift works?
Oh that’s a really cool way of looking at it! In the book it describes Billy’s pre-birth as “red light and bubbling sounds”, which read as inside the womb to me. But when Billy goes beyond his death, he sees “just violet light and a hum”. I thought that image of a purple between-space, where there isn’t “anybody else there, or anything” would work well as a signifier of time becoming unstuck, and tied in well with the book’s ideas of mortality and death. So I wasn’t thinking of doppler shifts or of indicating to the reader whether Billy had gone forwards or backwards, just that time travel had happened, and the era would be indicated by the art, clothing, characters, and colouring (ideally, anyway!).
Why the choice to decouple Kurt from the narrator’s position? Did this change necessitate the inclusion of the anecdote about his assurance that “There won’t be a part for John Wayne in my book?”
Kurt’s still in the book, but he’s less beside you all the time – when he does show up as a character, it’s either in the narrative (like he does in the story) or towards the end, where he’s shown in a white space, interviewing Billy. That was inspired by the book too – at various points Kurt writes things like “Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die” Those few words – “Billy says” – I love, because they suggest a truth (Kurt is just reporting the truth of what this person told him) while at the same time a lie (we know we’re reading a story). So having Kurt show up there to talk to Billy, to hear the things he’s saying that he could then later report to us, felt right. It also keeps the comic moving along nicely, still showing it’s got surprises for you. And given how Kurt’s voice is throughout the book – every sentence feels identifiable from 50 meters away as a Kurt Vonnegut sentence – it made me feel like he’d always be there in the text no matter how it was presented.
On this, despite portraying the horrors of war because of, and on, people, “Slaughterhouse-Five” remains darkly comedic and bitingly satirical. What about capturing these multiple modes was key to keeping the core of the novel alive, besides its firm, anti-war stance?
I felt like as long as the story was there – that Billy saw the same things, reacted the same way, goes to the same planets, and so on – that it would feel the same. I didn’t see my job as changing, necessarily, so much as translating and adapting: putting in what worked, figuring out what didn’t and then making it work – all towards the goal, in the end, of provoking the same feelings of sorrow and loss and hope and love in the reader with this graphic novel exactly as they are in the prose book. That was my guiding star with this project. It’s not a straight translation, and it’s not a photocopy of the book, but it’s my sincere hope that reading both or either will make you feel the same way, and ideally, giving you a new appreciation and understanding of what Kurt was saying back in 1969, and which still resonates just as strongly – if not more so – today.
Thanks Ryan for chatting with us! “Slaughterhouse-Five” is out September 15th.
