P. Craig Russell has spent much of his career taking stories from one medium and translating them into comics. Various fairy tales, operas, novels, and short stories have been rendered in his unique and exquisite style. His approach is grandoise, his ambition to find the beauty and wonder in sequential art. And Russell brings all that to his latest project, an adaptation of the 1993 Lois Lowry novel, The Giver, realized with frequent collaborators, Galen Showman and Scott Hampton.
Written by Lois LowryCover by P. Craig Russell
Adapted by P. Craig Russell
Illustrated by P. Craig Russell, Galen Showman, and Scott Hampton
Colored by Lovern Kindzierski
Lettered by Rick ParkerThe Giver is a modern classic and one of the most influential books of our time. Now in graphic novel format, Lois Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning classic story of a young boy discovering the dark secrets behind his seemingly ideal world is accompanied by renowned artist P. Craig Russell’s beautifully haunting illustrations. In this new graphic novel edition, readers experience the haunting story of twelve-year-old Jonas and his seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Witness Jonas’ assignment as the Receiver of Memory, watch as he begins to understand the dark secrets behind his fragile community, and follow the explosion of color into his world like never before.
As a child, I devoured The Giver. It was part of my reading repertoire, one of those books I frequently cycled through amidst all the other books I kept beside me. Time and time again I got lost in its uniform and guarded world. Time and time again, I returned to Jonas, waiting for those moments when he felt the change, when the world exploded with images and colors and music. However, as I got older, it was also one of those books that drifted away. This despite an opera, a stage play, and an aggressively mediocre movie. I didn’t sporadically revisit it like A Wrinkle in Time or The Phantom Tollbooth or Harry Potter. It existed in flashes and memories, a bit of a scene here, a stray line of dialogue over there. Yet P. Craig Russell’s adaptation tapped into something for me, allowing so much of that story to come flooding back.
As with many of his previous works, “The Giver” remains faithful to Lois Lowry’s original novel. It hits a lot of the same beats, it unfolds at a similar pace. It remains a science fiction story that works better when you’re in the middle of the narrative rather than when you’re reflecting on the ins and outs of its structure. Russell uses Lowry’s narrator to fill in the blank spaces, provide context, and get us inside Jonas’s head. He doesn’t switch to first person caption boxes — the laziest possible way to deliver narration — but maintains Lowry’s voice and renders Jonas’s observations to thought balloons.
Russell’s challenge, then, is to dramatize the story, to find a way to visualize it without simply mirroring the action in the descriptive boxes. And it’s here that we see Russell’s true talent. Because “The Giver” doesn’t feel like an illustrated version of the source material. It breathes and moves like this was the medium it was meant for all along.
“The Giver” is, of course, the story of Jonas, a young boy about to turn 12. He lives in a sanitized and safe society, where everything is completely controlled and regulated. “The community is so meticulously ordered, the choices so carefully made,” he reflects at one point, it’s the sort of place where nothing can go wrong. Jonas has his friends, he has his hobbies, and, as the story begins, he’s waiting anxiously for the Ceremony of Twelve, which is supposed to mark the next phase in his life. He’s selected to replace The Receiver of Memories. This person holds all the joys and sorrows of human history in his head, for the specific purpose of keeping the community from making terrible choices. Most dystopian stories want to dispense with history, to bury it under their propaganda. Lowry realizes the importance of this, even in a fascistic context.
Lowry’s world is not outwardly dangerous. It’s more like The Stepford Wives, where the true horror lies under the façade. Russell accomplishes this by rendering the first 2/3s of the book in pencil drawings. He uses layout blue to bring our attention to a specific thing (like Jonas’s eyes, which match the baby Gabriel’s), but, for the most part, scenes in the community have this empty and unfinished feel to them. It’s enough to say what’s going on, to give us a sense of place; however, we still feel something missing in these sequences.
Continued belowLife and color start to appear during the Receiving sequences. Colorist Lovern Kindzierski sticks to a basic palette during the memory sequences. He and Russell convey the warmth of the sun as well as its oppressive burn with a block of yellow. The exhilaration of snow and the biting freeze with a swath of blue. The more Jonas learns, the more colors Kindzierski employs, made brighter, more vibrant, more impactful as Russell also finally switches to ink.
It’s moments like these that Russell shows the necessity for his adaptation. The medium can go further and convey more, can rely on us to see something but still have that narrative interaction. In the afterward, Lowry mentions how this is the only adaptation to include the scene where Jonas bathes the old woman. Russell can deliver it with a tenderness and grace that would be far too difficult to convey on stage or in film. He may sometimes be faithful to a fault. He may forget an element in the page design, so something like the lettering disappears into the background during the printing process. Yet, he can sell the emotions, which compensates for everything.
“The Giver” is a sensual story, more interested in feeling and emotion than the kids banding together to rise up against its central oppressive society. So much understanding and knowledge is conveyed through a touch or a gesture and Russell is an expert at visualizing that moment, in tuning us into that sensation. Therefore, by the time we get to the climactic sequence, we’re as terrified and invested as the characters. That’s one of the strengths of the source material and it’s beautifully realized in the comic.
