Bruno Jenkins, the Augustus Gloop-like little boy who gets turned into a mouse by the Grand High Witch during her speech, has been excised and replaced by a little girl. The most immediate one is previewed on the cover.
There are some changes that have nothing to do with the challenges of adaptation, though.
#The witches roald dahl book pictures how to
Later, when she begins to explain how to spot a witch to him, Bagieu lays out all of the physical differences in just two pages, the graphic novel adopting the form of a textbook full of figures.
So, for example, the graphic novel opens with an original nine-page sequence, in which we meet our protagonist playing with a couple of toys, including a Margaret Hamilton-like witch, just after his parents’ funeral, and then watch as his grandmother, whom he calls Grandmama and who adopts and cares for him, awkwardly attempts to comfort him. They’re quite lively and engaging in prose, but they don’t lend themselves to scores and scores of panels.Ĭartoonist Pénélope Bagieu, whose previous work includes Brazen and California Dreamin‘, tackles this challenge in an interesting way, condensing a great deal of these particularly talky passages of the source novel, and expanding other portions of the novel through original, and particularly comic book-y, passages. That’s followed by another long passage in which the boy stumbles upon a meeting of all the witches in England, lead by The Grand High Witch herself, in which he relates the entirety of her speech to the reader. The book is told in first-person narration by its little-boy protagonist, and much of the first two-thirds or so of the book are the boy’s recounting of things he heard.įirst, there’s a long passage in which his grandmother, a retired “witchophile,” tells him everything she knows about witches, who, it turns out, are quite real, quite different than the witches you might have heard about in other stories, and quite a danger to all children everywhere. As Roald Dahl’s children’s novels go, 1983’s The Witches is not the most adaptation-ready, particularly if the adaptation in question is into the highly visual medium of comics.
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