Slaughterhouse-five Or the children's crusade : a duty-dance with death

Slaughterhouse-Five is an iconic, widely beloved novel, so undertaking a graphic adaptation is no easy task. Happily, North and Monteys have done an excellent job, both in staying true to Billy Pilgrim's story and in maintaining the character of Vonnegut's wry, self-referential writing style in an entirely new format. Small changes help this considerably--Kilgore Trout, for instance, is a comics writer in this iteration, and Vonnegut is more vividly present in the frame narrative--but it's the bold artwork and playful use of comics narrative styles that really make this a success. North and Monteys skillfully slip among eras, handily indicating temporal changes with visual cues: Trout's stories appear in pulpy benday dots; Ronald Weary's daydream of future glory, which never comes to fruition, appears in non-photo-blue drafting pencil; conversations between Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim appear on crisp, white, panel-less spreads, as if they're happening out of time. A particular highlight is Monteys' masterful character design, especially of Billy, who ages realistically from decade to decade without losing his lanky, angular frame and recognizable nose. Slaughterhouse-Five is of course a deeply affecting novel, which is part of its perennial appeal, and this adaptation, which movingly and quietly focuses on body language, facial expression, and gesture, not only honors that aspect of its source material but powerfully amplifies it. This is the best kind of adaptation, where the story is transformed by the change in medium.

After becoming unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim begins to experience all of the major moments in his life nonlinearly. One minute he's a middle-aged optometrist, the next he might find himself recuperating after surviving a plane crash, or laboring in a prisoner of war camp in Germany toward the end of World War II or luxuriating with his lover and child in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. Throughout his life, Billy constantly encounters cruelty, hypocrisy, and pain; as the Tralfamadorian's say, "So it goes." In this brilliant adaptation of Vonnegut's classic antiwar novel, North (How To Invent Everything) and Monteys (Solid State) retain Vonnegut's playfully mordant and deeply compassionate voice and take full advantage of the opportunity to convey the novel's fractured narrative visually.Minor characters' backgrounds are depicted in short, three-panel comic strips, while sf stories written by Billy's favorite author, Kilgore Trout, are rendered in the style of pulpy E.C. Comics tales of terror, the bustling majesty of Dresden, Germany's pre-firebombing presented in a gorgeously detailed spread. VERDICT Wih this work, North and Monteys have created the best, and most effective, graphic novel adaptation of a literary novel in recent memory.