The New Yorker takes a look at a couple sterling examples of biographies that have been done up lately as graphic novels, including works on Anne Frank and Vlad the Impaler.
From the piece...
The Anne Frank book is aimed at early high-schoolers, and the authors take care to note that it’s a biography, not an illustrated version of the diary. The form affords the opportunity to present, say, a precise rendering of 263 Prisengracht, with its Annex, in clean lines. Still, the captions shock: “The first experiments in killing camp prisoners in a gas chamber took place in Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941.” The rich drawing depicts rows of emaciated prisoners with color-coded tags; Anne’s sister, Margot, fleeing to the Annex on her bike, under the cover of a rainstorm. Alongside careful maps and detailed timelines, the frames teach chilling vocabulary: “During the first years of the war, mobile killing squads called Einstazgruppen were used to kill mainly Eastern European Jews”; “There was even a special unit, consisting of around fifty Dutch Nazis and known as the Henneicke Column, which captured Jews in hiding.”
1 comment:
Both stories seem a little intense to be converted into the graphic novel format...especially the Vlad the Impaler story.
Still, it would be an interesting book to read, and (gory as it is), it might be a good way to encourage teens to read more.
However, I will say that I read an account of Vlad's monstrosities in a book about Dracula, and I was mortified by what I learned; visuals, in my opinion, would only make the story harder to stomach.
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