Adapting Cartoons to Books

< Back to Adaptation series library

An odd conversion this is. When Comic Books came out they were intended to be an upgrade to Books and Cartoons were that to Comic Books. So I find it odd when I'm confronted with a Book of a Cartoon. Nevertheless they exist just the same as a Book of Doctor Who can exist.

I had this for some reason at a young age.

Yes, The team behind South Park released the scripts to their episodes in book form! Frankly I feel like this is not faithful. I say that because to call it faithful is to assume that someone else wrote this. Because this isn't the case this isn't faithful or rather it is an entirely direct conversion. As in this is pure bred. Pedigree. 100% Pure.

However it'll probably be more useful to show an example of a Cartoon adaptation to a Book written by some other third party.

There was a time in my life where I had just finished binge watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time and wanted more out of this lush world Nickelodeon and company invented. One particular method I took to do this is plan to collect all the books based on the series.

I only got as far as this one...

Much like the other corresponding scroll books for Earth, Air and Fire, the Water scroll book tells of the history and culture of the Water tribe. The native civilization that were gifted in Water bending.

(The cover of the book should make it obvious what Water bending is)

This was a really good read. It got really indepth into techniques, food and many other aspects of a civilization which I didn't really think the creators of the show would get around to elaborating!

Overall this is a good example of a Cartoon to Book adaptation that doesn't tell a story accurate to the show but instead decides to build up the world much like a documentary and not too disimilar to the never ending library of Star Wars books also covering similar topics.