The great Gatsby The graphic novel

This respectable graphic adaptation of Fitzgerald's canonical novel succeeds as homage, and mostly as a satisfying social critique in its own right. In the introduction, Fitzgerald's great grandson, Blake Hazard, acknowledges the challenges inherent to adapting the 1925 classic to a comic, observing that "the language itself is in some ways the main character." And while Fordham (To Kill a Mockingbird: A Graphic Novel) must pare down the text, he does a fine job distilling the haunted romanticism of Fitzgerald's narrative, which describes the doomed love between the enigmatic Gatsby and the lovely but numb Daisy, who is married to the brutish, racist Tom Buchanan. The clean, Art Deco--like backgrounds by Morton (His Dream of the Skyland) evoke the beguiling but ultimately empty nouveau-riche milieu of Gatsby and the Buchanans in suburban Long Island, as well as the dreary gray world of Myrtle and George Wilson in working-class Queens. There the two classes collide, drawing to a tragic conclusion. Though the paper-doll-like character designs are appropriately reminiscent of period illustration, their wide stares and stances feel stiff. While perhaps inevitably lacking the complexity of the original, the fidelity of this graphic adaptation should satisfy Fitzgerald devotees. Agents: Dorian Karchmar and Jay Mandel, WME; Alyssa Henkin, Trident Media Group; and Jenny Savill, Andrew Nurnberg Assoc. (July)

Seeking a fresh start after returning home from the trenches of World War I, Nick Carraway moves to West Egg, NY. His cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom, introduce him to the life of luxury enjoyed by the lavishly wealthy. But their lifestyle pales in comparison to that of Nick's neighbor, Jay Gatsby, who routinely throws raucous parties on the grounds of his enormous gothic mansion. Nick is intrigued when Gatsby seems interested in becoming his friend but soon discovers that Gatsby is using him to get closer to his cousin--for Daisy is Gatsby's singular obsession, and the inspiration for the elaborate mythology he's constructed around himself. VERDICT Fordham (To Kill a Mockingbird: A Graphic Novel) retains much of Fitzgerald's singular prose, which Morton (His Dream of the Skyland) illustrates with an eye toward period detail and restraint that blossoms into expressive tableaus of vivid color at key moments. Here, Fitzgerald's incisive exposé of the shallow excesses of the elite feels startlingly fresh nearly 100 years after its original publication.

CHAPTER I IN MY YOUNGER and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the  intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. Excerpted from The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fred Fordham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.