Adapting Books to Comic Books

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This is relatively easy since because they both stand on a page based platform, they hardly have to change anything. Apart from representation. Books are flexible. They contain only words (for the sake of keeping things simple, story books count as comics for the reasons I will explain soon) and require the imagination to build an image of how the characters look to every detail. Some people draw these characters as 'Fan Art'. The same is said for the Graphic Novel adaptation of Terry Pratchett's 'The Colour of Magic' and 'The Light Fantastic'. I don't know if it was released separate but I have a big book that contains both stories respectively.

As I mentioned, a book has no images but it's full of descriptions to build up a scene and the appearance of the characters. Readers imagine what they look like but this creates a gap in familiarity between someones idea of this characters and yours. The same goes for the Terry Pratchett Graphic Novel. That flexibility in imagination is what gives the Book representation and once you've seen someone else's drawing of the character, that original interpretation is lost and depending on popularity, the character design could become iconic and stick with almost no hope of escaping. I say 'almost' with the exception of some other representation becoming more iconic and popular or possibly a rebooted version of the character.

Visual flexibility is almost impossible unless you use minimal, and I really mean minimal details.

72 Circles with dots in the middle of each can look like a collection of different things from eyes to glasses. From car wheels to a pair of, *Ahem*... breasts.

In Sweden a group of Uni or college students (I can't remember which) made a toy called 'Pinko'. A block of wood with a piece of short, attached rope, a wooden knob and a little face. The toy is supposed to encourage cognitive imagination by not restricting the child to a narrow theme like Cowboys or Space men.

I feel it falls flat on its face. Lego can do it better but only with another pieces to fit together. Much like having enough details in a book describing a character is necessary to imagine what they look like. You can't make much with only 2 2x1 flat tiles and even though you could imagine a short list of items this could be (i.e. gun, boomerang) it won't be enough for the child's imagination to represent creatively. Much like how Pinko gives so little to the child to experiment with.

A proper way to make Pinko work better is simply to give a child one of those wooden pose models that are used for art. Featureless and pose-able is exactly what can get the creative juices flowing as there are no boundaries other than it's a person. But why not step it up by allowing appendages to be removed and let each forearm, foreleg etc., extendable and retractable so height is never an issue allowing even more freedom than Pinko ever did.

I mentioned that this idea does restrict the imagination to a person which still brings up my last point that physical representation is near impossible.

Sorry this chapter was long and travelled a distance away from the original conversation but that's what these chapters are going to be by default. Objectively classed as ramblings.