The Handmaid's Tale (Graphic Novel): the graphic novel (Gilead, 1)

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About Us Advertise Online Why Did I Get This Ad? About Our Ads Community Guidelines Press Room Other Hearst Subscriptions Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Anne Miller. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Bradley, Laura. Handmaid’s Tale: The Strange History of “Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum”. Vanity Fair, May, 2017: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/handmaids-tale-nolite-te-bastardes-carborundorum-origin-margaret-atwood. Atwood, Margaret. “What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump”. The New York Times, March 10, 2017.

See: https://www.themarysue.com/exclusive-the-handmaids-tale-graphic-novel/. Lisa Jadwin has published a very detailed article on the context in which the novel was published the first time around which might have contributed to its success. See also Jadwin, 2009, passim. Slattery, Mary F. “What is Literary Realism?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 13:1, 1972, pp. 55–62. Adams, Jeff. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. Oxford, Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2008.

It's this ability to accommodate both the mundane and the fantastic that suits the graphic form to the The Handmaid's Tale's demands, as "comics and graphic novels can switch seamlessly between abstract and literal imagery," Nault says. She describes a scene late in the story to demonstrate, when Offred, the narrator, "thinks of bodies she's seen hanging on the wall. The shapes of withered seed pods in Serena Joy's flower bed become the shapes of hanging handmaids." Mancuso, Cecilia. “Speculative or Science Fiction: As Margaret Atwood shows, there isn’t much difference.” The Guardian. 10.08.2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/speculative-or-science-fiction-as-margaret-atwood-shows-there-isnt-much-distinction.

Even so, for her own interpretation of Gilead, Nault didn't need anything beyond the text itself. "My hope was to not just show the story with pictures, but to capture the spirit of the novel," she says. "The book is of course horrific, but it's also witty, dry, and sometimes darkly funny." Thus, the comic format complements both the narrator's perspective — which reflects jumps in time, memory, and thought — and the story's frequent overlapping of reality and fantasy. American policy on abortion also threatens to impact on women in many other countries because “in 2017 President Trump reinstated and expanded a policy called the ‘global gag rule’ [… which] states that any overseas organization receiv[ing] US global health funding cannot even mention abortion as part of their counselling or education programs—even if the money for these particular programs does not come from the US”. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/06/abortion-laws-in-the-us-10-things-you-need-to-know/. Spanjers, Rik. Comic Realism and the Maus Event: Comics and the Dynamics of World War II Remembrance. Unpublished diss. University of Amsterdam, 2019.How do we navigate the world around us? Where do we start if we want to learn something new? Here is a reading list of non-fiction books exploring ideas that matter, including books by Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Ai Weiwei, Chelsea Manning and more.