Parable of the Sower

[psocoptera]

I read Invisible Kingdom on paper earlier in the year, but for some reason I then forgot that I could read the other Hugo comics that way too, and was miserably getting through a couple of pages at a time of the PDF of Parable of the Sower. But now I have once again remembered that just because something is in the packet it doesn't mean I have to use the packet copy, and have all the remaining comics on their way to me from the library. Parable got here first and it was much more readable in print, yay. Unfortunately I still didn't think much of it as an adaptation - I mean, it was fine, but it didn't particularly add anything or show me the story in a new light or anything. Except maybe that the "narrow lens" of the comic panels actually made it feel less real to me in some ways - I am not a big visualizer when I read, but I know California, and I can picture what it would be like to be in those settings changed in those ways, and in the comic it felt a lot more generic and vague, because there isn't much space devoted to setting. In fact almost every panel is either heads-and-torsos or heads-and-shoulders, with just enough full-body silhouettes or big many-person panels to make it not completely monotonous. Kind of ironic since the natural environment is important to the story. I wish we had gotten to see what this story might have looked like from an artist who cared about plants, or scenery - think about Ursula Vernon in the Digger era, or E.K. Weaver's use of place in TJ & Amal, or Melanie Gillman. Actually, my dream way to have done this adaptation would be Sandman-style, break the whole thing up and have a bunch of different artists show us their own interpretations of the characters and their own approach to choosing how to bring it to comics. (But maybe that would be less accessible, if part of the point of this was to appeal to an audience who wouldn't read the prose book, bah.)