The Graveyard Book, a novel first published in 2008, won the Newberry Medal and the Pushcart Prize, and was one of the very few books to win both top prizes in American children’s literature. In this reviewer’s opinion, it is Neil Gaiman’s best novel so far. Given the depth and range of his work that’s saying a lot. Gaiman is still best known for his Sandman graphic novels, still probably the greatest work of comic writing in the medium’s history. So it’s always interesting when Gaiman’s novels are transformed into comics. His writing is so visually strong that the transition to the graphic medium appears seamless, though clearly this is a process that takes a lot of hard work.
Fortunately, the man in charge of the transition from novel to comic, P Craig Russell, is a master of reinterpretations, and has helmed several wonderful graphic novel versions, from Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner to Gaiman (the children’s book Coraline). Russell and Gaiman have collaborated extensively before, the finest example of this being the single-issue comic Ramadan, from the Sandman series, a high point in a saga featuring several of the medium’s finest artists.
To boil the story down to its most rudely oversimplified version, The Graveyard Book is The Jungle Book set in a graveyard. Nobody ‘Bod’ Owens’ family is murdered when he is an infant, and he manages to escape to a nearby graveyard, where he is adopted by a family of ghosts. He’s given the freedom of the graveyard, and grows up between the worlds of the living and the dead, learning many fantastic lessons about the world along the way. There’s also a larger plot, of course, which builds on The Jungle Book-adaptation world, adds a compelling plot, spine-chilling villains, always a Gaiman specialty, and makes The Graveyard Book far more than a retelling of anything. The supporting characters are exceptional, from a loving and potentially terrifying teen witch-ghost, to an array of exciting monsters. My personal favourite is the Sleer, which takes the idea of Kipling’s blind white cobra guardian of the ruby ankus and builds on it in a truly scary way—a completely idea-driven monster, though, and quite unsuitable for any form of illustration.
The thing about Neil Gaiman’s novels, quite often, is that they don’t really need the art; there’s a lot of mystery, many secrets not quite revealed in the text, a lot of room for the reader’s imagination to make its own world and build its own story. This story’s Bagheera, Silas, was a far more sinister and captivating guardian in the novel, because the book never made it completely clear that he was a vampire. The graphic novel doesn’t have this option, of course, and so decides to go in the opposite direction, drawing Silas quite beautifully as a very classic Bela Lugosi vampire. Several of the book’s most enigmatic passages, like the dance between the living and the dead in the town square, and the Bandar-log sequence when Bod is abducted by a group of ghouls all named after dead power figures, are now drawn in painstaking and beautiful detail. But the (extremely well-executed) effect, of course, is completely different from that of these same passages in the novel.
Fortunately, though, it’s not as if we have to decide whether the book is better than the comic or not; we can simply decide to enjoy both, accept they are different stories, and admire several talented storytellers at work telling subtly different versions of the same story.
The drawings are beautifully done, each artist getting the opportunity to both showcase his or her individual style, and to fit into a simple but compelling overall visual thematic that lets the story flow on smoothly without the artist’s changes becoming at all jarring. There are plenty of fantastical creatures for them to work with, of course, from the terrifying underground Indigo Man to the charmingly homicidal ghouls. In whatever form you might find it, The Graveyard Book is a confidently told, charming, powerful and altogether wonderful story that I have no hesitation in recommending strongly.