About a year later, a graphic novel adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five came out. It was adapted by Ryan North, creator of Dinosaur Comics and longtime writer of the current, popular version of Squirrel Girl. It was illustrated by Albert Monteys, a Spanish cartoonist who has worked mostly in satire. And now I've read that version, too.
So, this time, I need to talk about the pictures, and the transformation of Vonnegut's words on a page into a visual format. I've already said what I had to say about the story itself, about poor Billy Pilgrim's fate - many of the things I wrote here two years ago I thought again while reading this version; I still agree with all of that. My favorite line is still "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."
I have the sense that North has fiddled a bit with the structure and timeline, but that's a dangerous assumption to make: Vonnegut told the story sideways to begin with. Remember: Billy is unstuck in time. Slaughterhouse-Five, in any version, follows him that way, skipping from moment to moment across decades. It may well be that this is exactly the same structure as Vonnegut's original. But I don't think so.
I think North has tweaked things a bit to make better visual transitions: to turn Slaughterhouse-Five into something more purely comics, and not just prose poured into a new form and illustrated. He has to do that just to make Kurt Vonnegut a character in this version. Well, Vonnegut was a character in the novel: his voice was omnipresent, his viewpoint was consistent, his actions were mentioned more than once. But he was the omniscient authorial voice, without a name, mostly not taking human form. North isn't pretending to be Vonnegut to tell this story - that's another choice he could have made, or Vonnegut might have made if he'd adapted it himself - but he wants to tell the same story, and include the Vonnegut bits. So we see Kurt on a plane flying back to German years later with an old buddy. We see him in the distance at the POW camp, at least twice. We see the famous scene where he admits all of the soldiers were babies and agrees to the subtitle of "The Children's Crusade." He's there throughout.
He's just not our point of view, the way he is in the novel. The graphic novel is less personal to Vonnegut, and maybe more for us: we are the ones watching Bill Pilgrim, directly. We're not watching Vonnegut put him through his paces. He's front and center, blinking, confused, trapped in amber. Unstuck.
Monteys has a lightly caricatured style: Pilgrim is probably the least "realistic" looking character, with a very long face and a gigantic nose. It's an open face, one for showing details of emotion: it was a good choice. It works well. Monteys also varies his panel layouts a lot, dropping into a grid only rarely and breaking out splash pages and huge expanses of white multiple times. He and North have thoroughly turned Slaughterhouse-Five into a visual representation; this is not some Classic Comics template with all of the words shoehorned in.
Listen: I can't tell you this is just as good as the original. I don't know how to compare art works across formats like that. The original is a towering masterpiece of 20th century literature. It's one of the great anti-war novels of all time. That's a lot to live up to. But this version of Slaughterhouse-Five is beautiful and heartbreaking and sad and true and wonderful and magnificent and engrossing. There is no part of it that I can imagine changing to be better. It's worth reading if you know the original. It's maybe even more worth reading if you don't. That's what I can tell you.
[1] I haven't re-read them in decades; my opinion is outdated. I want to read him again; maybe I will.
And I say I had the urge. Maybe I didn't. Maybe I always was going to re-read it in 2019, and just got to that moment in my own personal mountain-range. Who can say?
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