I don’t feel like this expression on Reagan’s face is the best expression for this moment.Ĭath is a quiet character, but in a prose novel, the reader gets to hear a lot of her thoughts. I also noticed a few sequences where the action read right-to-left despite the comic as a whole being left-to-right, which was a bit confusing, but otherwise it was very clear and easy to read. Where this prettiness falls flat is in comedy moments: the character art isn’t exaggerated enough to really make the jokes land. The characters are all rendered with a delicate, shojo-manga sparkly prettiness that I’m sure will appeal to fans of the source material and new readers alike. This is Gabi Nam’s first published comics work in English, but she’s clearly an experienced draftsperson. I also like how the boys Cath meets resemble Baz and Simon just enough to make you wonder if that’s part of their appeal. It’s a very concise way to convey that information. I especially liked the insert pages that described “canon” and “fanon” Baz and Simon: the characters labeled with their attributes according to how the Simon Snow books portray them compared to how Cath portrays them in her fanfic. The introduction scene somehow feels funnier in this adaptation than in the novel it’s based on. This makes Cath feel more sympathetic and closer to the reader. They also switched the narration from third-person to first-person, in keeping with the manga art style.

Maggs and Nam solve this by adapting the fanfic bits the same way they adapted the “real world” bits, setting the fiction-within-the-fiction off with black panel borders and using comic-only techniques like labeled images to add exposition. It included a fake Wikipedia article about the Simon Snow series and excerpts from Cath’s fanfictions about said series. Imagine my surprise when the graphic novel adaptation was more fun to read than the novel it’s based on.įangirl the prose novel was, well, wordy. I had read Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell a few years ago and liked… some aspects of it, but mostly I was intensely curious how a novel that was so in its protagonist’s head and so heavily about writing could possibly be adapted to a visual medium in a way that communicated the same information. When I saw this book existed, I screamed out loud and then begged for a review copy. Fangirl Rainbow Rowell (author), Sam Maggs (adaptation writer), Gabi Nam (artist) Unlike the source material, the graphic novelization of Fangirl is a beautiful, contemplative, and fun reading experience. 1 tells the story of Cath, a popular fanfiction author struggling with adjusting to her first semester at college, meeting new people, and growing apart from her twin sister.

1 by Rainbow Rowell, Sam Maggs, and Gabi Nam adapts Rainbow Rowell’s original novel to a manga-inspired, black-and-white graphic novel for VIZ’s new imprint VIZ Originals.

Fangirl the manga