Rex Ogle is the award-winning author of more than 100 books, comics, graphic novels, and memoirs—most notably Free Lunch, Road Home, and Pizza Face, as well as Northranger (the latter written under the pseudonym Rey Terciero). Born and raised in Texas, he now lives in Los Angeles. Here, Ogle reflects on his forthcoming book, Dan in Green Gables, a graphic novel retelling of the children’s classic by L.M. Montgomery.
Have you ever picked up Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick? It’s 685 pages. Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame? 940 pages. Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo? 1,300 pages. It’s no wonder I chose F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when given an option in high school English. And I wasn’t the only one in class who went for the shortest book.
Growing up as a boy in rural Texas, there were two choices for free-time activities: sports or reading. I always chose reading. I loved the Chronicles of Narnia, the Hardy Boys, and Stephen King’s long list of horror. But I also adored Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Yet some of my most precious stories were neither prose nor poetry. They were comics. (I’m looking at you, Uncanny X-Men!)
My first books were Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, which had ample pictures alongside beginners’ words. As I matured, picture books were pulled from my hands and replaced with image-less “real” books, packed with paragraphs and words running left to right, left to right, left to right, and on and on. I didn’t mind it... but I found myself often drawn back to Calvin & Hobbes. The marriage of art and words was as special to me as the power couple known as chocolate and peanut butter.
And after a long school day of dodging bullies, containing overwhelming emotions, and juggling mountains of homework, graphic novels offered a refreshing respite to lie back and get lost in a world that didn’t require me to drown in a sea of syntax. Sequential storytelling let my mind do a little less work in terms of imagining new worlds, philosophies, and perspectives.
Today, kids have less time than ever. They are inundated with homework, addicted to cell phones, lost in immersive MMORPGs, or swallowed whole by social media. After hundreds of school and library events, I have heard the same thing over and over from educators and librarians: kids want to read less.
It hurts my author heart to hear that, but its truth is undeniable, which is why we need to meet kids where they are at.
Modern youth are growing up on screens. That means a waterfall of words and images, especially on social media. TikToks often have subtitles, YouTube loves its comment sections, Instagram stories have room for written text, and memes too have words, if only a few.
So when a young reader—or young non-reader—picks up a classic piece of literature like Homer’s Odyssey and feels the thickness of 541 pages and sees loads of text and footnotes, of course they retreat to their phone.
But if you offer up something in their comfort zone, they might just give Tony Weaver Jr.’s relatable and funny Weirdo a try. Anime reigns supreme on Netflix, so why not offer up Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece to a child who would rather be watching the show, but may find delight in the manga origin of their favorite cartoon. And if a kid doesn’t like fiction, suggest nonfiction—such as Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales—that will not only make them laugh, but offer a subtle education they might not otherwise receive from a lengthy history textbook.
I’ve wanted to write books my whole life. That includes my childhood, during which I had dozens of story ideas every day. But some of the best ones came to me while perusing classic literature. When reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, I wanted to see how the girls would handle the stress of modern life. While studying Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, I wished the characters were Mexican like me. And when I found Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, I only made it a hundred pages in because it turned out there weren’t real dragons in it. I was devastated; I wanted supernatural monsters!
And while I was daydreaming about reforging my required reading (and sometimes extra credit), I thought, “Hmm. These would be so much better as comics.” So as an adult, I wanted to write stories for the younger me. I wanted to see myself reflected in these stories. With prose, it’s easy to say a character is white, or brown, or Black. But when you see these characters with the same skin color as you, something magical happens and awakens a hunger for more stories.
That’s why I wrote Meg, Jo, Beth, & Amy. That’s why I wrote Northranger. That’s why I wrote Doña Quixote. And that’s why I wrote Dan in Green Gables.
So if I’m going to write for teen me, I know he’s going to want something that’s not only fun and powerful and emotional and hilarious, but also… short. Graphic novels are quick reads for kids. So much so, that they often go back and read them again, and again, and again.
And if those kids are anything like me—and trust me, they are—they’ll want to start creating their own classics, so they can take well-known stories and re-imagine them to see themselves.
Here are a few other graphic novel adaptions and retellings that I absolutely adore and recommend to every teacher, educator, and librarian I meet:
Re-Imaginings
- Anne of West Philly by Ivy Noelle Weir and Myisha Haynes
- Baba Yaga’s Assistant by Marika McCoola and Emily Carroll
- Big Jim and the White Boy by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson
- The Daughters of Ys by M.T. Anderson and Jo Rioux
- Fables by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and many more
- Fairest of All (Whatever After) by Sarah Mlynowski and Anu Chouhan
- The Fox Maidens by Robin Ha
- Goldilocks: Wanted Dad or Alive by Chris Colfer and Jon Proctor
- Jo: An Adaptation of Little Women by Kathleen Gros
- The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen
- One Trick Pony by Nathan Hale
- The Secret Garden on 81st Street by Ivy Noelle Weird and Amber Padilla
- Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
Adaptations
- Richard Adams’s Watership Down, adapted by James Sturm and Joe Sutphin.
- Frank Herbert’s Dune, adapted by Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, Raúl Allén, and Patricia Martín.
- Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, adapted by Hope Larson.
- Lois Lowry’s The Giver, adapted by P. Craig Russell.
- Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, adapted by Mariah Marsden and Brenna Thummler.
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a Manga Classic, adapted by Stacy King and Virginia Nitouhei.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, adapted by Ryan North and Albert Monteys.
Dan in Green Gables by Rey Terciero, illus. by Claudia Aguirre. Penguin Workshop, $24.99 hardcover June 3 ISBN 978-0-593-38557-9; $17.99 paper ISBN 978-0-59338-558-6
