1119. This week, we talk with illustrator and cartoonist K. Woodman-Maynard about her new graphic novel adaptation of "Tuck Everlasting." We look at the creative process of adapting a beloved book, including how she uses visual storytelling to convey emotion and meaning with watercolor and panel design. We also look at her approach to condensing the original novel into a visual medium.
1119. This week, we talk with illustrator and cartoonist K. Woodman-Maynard about her new graphic novel adaptation of "Tuck Everlasting." We look at the creative process of adapting a beloved book, including how she uses visual storytelling to convey emotion and meaning with watercolor and panel design. We also look at her approach to condensing the original novel into a visual medium.
K. Woodman Maynard on Instagram
K. Woodman Maynard on Substack
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we're talking with illustrator and cartoonist K. Woodman Maynard about her new graphic novel adaptation of Tuck Everlasting. If you haven't read the original, don't worry; I hadn't either. And if this is your first graphic novel, well, it was mine too, but the book was gorgeous and so compelling.
I love the way she handles tone and pacing combined with visual storytelling through watercolor and panel design. We talk about her creative process, what it means to adapt such an iconic piece of literature, and how she brings emotion and meaning into every page. So even if comics aren't normally your thing, I think you'll find this conversation interesting, especially if you're curious about what happens when words and pictures have to share the same space. K. Woodman Maynard, welcome to The Grammar Girl Podcast.
K. Woodman Maynard: Thank you so much for having me.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, we're so excited to have you here. So, Tuck Everlasting is such a beloved children's book. I know a lot of people like just adore it. So how did it come about that you got to create the graphic novel for this book?
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, I'm so lucky. It is such a beautiful book, and I had adapted The Great Gatsby into a graphic novel, and so they had seen that and felt like I might be a good fit, so they approached me.
I should add too that I had read it as a kid, and I remembered that I loved it but also felt angry and betrayed by it. And so, when they asked me, I was like, do I want to adapt this? And so, I ran out to the bookstore, reread the book, and was like, oh yes, this is such a beautiful book, and I do want to adapt this. And I feel like my artistic voice could really add a lot to this story.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it is. We won't do any spoilers, but the end is surprising. So yeah, I can see why you may have felt that way, but I did not feel that way after reading your beautiful adaptation. I thought it seemed warm and right. Yeah, no, I loved it. But it was kind of, it's kind of deep, especially given that it's primarily for kids, right?
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, it's for ages 10 to 14. But I really kind of see it as for adults too because it's dealing a lot with mortality and the cycle of life. And that's why I was so excited to adapt it because I was, you know, selfishly like, oh, maybe this will also help me deal with these things. And I think it has helped.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, yeah. No, I enjoyed it. I read the whole thing. So can you talk about the process for—actually, I want to hold up some pictures so people who are watching on YouTube can see for just a second. It's really gorgeous, and it's these the, they're sort of watercolor-like images, and I would love to hear more about your process. There are some pictures in the back of the book that show how you've worked on it, and it looks like a lot of work.
K. Woodman Maynard: It is so much work, and they are actually watercolored, so I kind of move back and forth between digital and traditional mediums, and I eventually end up printing out my line art onto watercolor paper and then watercoloring it by hand and then scanning it back in, and doing some touch-up work. But it's a really involved process.
It basically though, goes from kind of tiny thumbnail drawings of the whole book, kind of a plan of what's going to be on each page—and then I draw those at bigger sizes and I do various iterations until I get to the final one, and then I'll watercolor that. So, it's a huge amount of work, but I really love doing it.
Mignon Fogarty: You had a stack of images that must have been a foot and a half tall that you were holding in the picture.
K. Woodman Maynard: I don't think it was quite a foot and a half. It felt like a foot and a half, but I think it's probably like eight inches or something of the watercolor papers. That was on the day I handed in the book. I held up the stack of the final art, which is a really fun thing about working traditionally. My friends who do digital graphic novels are like, oh, it's hard for people to comprehend how much work is involved, but when they can see it, people kind of understand.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Do you need a special kind of printer to print on watercolor paper?
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, I have an Epson Giclée fine art printer, and so it can take thick paper, but this was just something I tested for Gatsby, and I had that printer because I had a small Etsy shop where I sold my own art, and I just tested it out, and it happened to be that the ink didn't bleed. And so that's kind of the process I've done going forward.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that's what surprised me as I was reading about it. I'm like, wow, the ink doesn't bleed when you get it all wet with watercolors.
K. Woodman Maynard: I mean, some printers it does. I had a very stressful last chapter of this book where the printer broke, and I was like, “How am I going to finish this book?” And I tested out different friends' printers, and the ink bled, and then eventually I just bought a new printer. But it was this whole dramatic thing where we were trying to get it fixed, and you know, it was a whole thing.
Mignon Fogarty: On deadline. Yeah, I know that sounds stressful. So, you know, as coming from an angle of someone who works more with words, you know, I imagine—I mean, obviously in this adaptation, you could—it's mostly pictures, you know, it's gorgeous, beautiful pictures. I'm giving a glare here, but I think people can see. But there are so many fewer words than in the original novel. Like how did you choose which parts of it to use, or which. Like, are you rewriting the words to fit into a smaller space, or are you choosing, you know, specific lines that are the most important in the original book?
K. Woodman Maynard: I would say I'm more choosing specific lines and then making adjustments to them, you know, to sometimes like verb tenses or if I cut a sentence afterwards, maybe I have to make tweaks to the sentence that I kept. But I try to use as much of the original text as I can. But it is the really the hard part of adapting because I love the original text, but at the same time, I also want to prioritize the graphic novel medium. And so I think I try to show as much as I can. So, if I can show it with my art, I try not to say it and I try not to repeat it. And there are exceptions of that because sometimes Natalie Babbitt's words are just so beautiful, and I want my art to just say the same thing as the words. But I also use words kind of graphically too, as I'm sure you noticed.
Like, so sometimes the narration is wrapped around a tree or is in the water or in the clouds, and that was a way for me to include more narration without feeling like it was weighing down the story, and I felt like it kind of works better with capturing the mood, which is always kind of what I'm focused on when I'm making graphic novels.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. What's an example of a place where you use the illustration to sort of show something instead of putting it in the text?
K. Woodman Maynard: Well, I think there's a lot of things, kind of with character. So, you know, I'm not saying a character is angry, you know, I'm just showing it. So that's kind of like the easiest thing. But I would say like especially with a man in the yellow suit, like a lot of what he is saying in his speech bubbles is very courteous and polite and I should add that this is the antagonist; this is like definitely the villain in the story. But what he's saying is, is usually sounds very nice, but how I'm drawing him—with his body language and with, you know, a focus on his skinny, bone-like hands, which is in the text—or his tapping foot or different things I can do visually with even speech bubbles, like at one point his speech bubble wraps around two people who he's blackmailing. And so, I'm trying to use the medium in ways to show that he's evil without saying, you know, this guy's bad.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that's wonderful. Because he did, he felt very sinister, but I could not have, as a reader, I could not have pointed to those visual elements that made me feel that way. It just conveyed the feeling, which was wonderful. And I noticed the colors change too. Like the whole vibe of a page will go from very dark to very bright and yellow and sunny. So, can you talk about how using colors sort of also helps you tell the story?
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, so I try to use color more emotionally than I do from like a literal perspective. Like I don't even really make green grass necessarily unless like everything is green in that scene. So, I'm definitely being more abstract in my colors, and so I'm looking at the mood and trying to tell that emotional story through the colors. And again, that's I guess another example of me not actually using words to convey meaning. And in this story, weather is so important, and so the color like gold is used a lot. And that is kind of a big part of, kind of an oppressiveness in those scenes to some degree. Like it's beautiful, but there's also a heaviness of that intense sunlight.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I love the part you talked about; you were talking about the speech bubbles earlier, and there's a speech bubble when it's really hot where the bubble itself, the outline of it looks like it's sort of melting away.
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, I love doing things with speech bubbles. I did that more in The Great Gatsby just because there's more about how people speak in that book. But I did a couple instances in this sort of, because in graphic novels, that's one of the very unique things to the medium is speech bubbles, like speech bubbles and panel borders. You know, the kind of things that all the art is within. And so I try to play with those to emphasize, yeah, the feeling, the weather, the mood, all the things.
Mignon Fogarty: What are some other things you've done with speech bubbles or borders that I may have felt but not actually noticed?
K. Woodman Maynard: Well, there's a scene where the protagonist returns home after being away for a long time, and instead of using it’s called a grid in comics, just where the panel borders are horizontal lines or vertical lines, the grid sort of breaks apart and it's more flowy, and then they're actually roses kind of out within the panel borders.
And I just wanted to show the happiness and the timelessness sort of, of like when you return home and that feeling of just like there isn't a specific sequence of actions, it's just kind of flashes. And so that's what the more amorphous panel borders. And then the flowers obviously just feeling happy, but they're also cultivated flowers because her home is very pristine and refined. And so I used roses, whereas the Tuck family, which is the family she's been with, is much more chaotic, and they're more represented by like daisies or more wild things.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And you said in the end matter that talks more about the process you talked about the circles that are sort of hidden throughout the book too that have symbolic meaning. Can you talk a little bit about those?
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, so the story is a lot about mortality and the cycle of life and sort of how dying isn't necessarily this horrible thing, but it's part of this larger process that we all go through. And in the book, Natalie Babbitt uses so many references to circles. There's Ferris wheels, there's the moon, there's clocks. It's just again and again. And so that was just a kind of obvious thing to me as a creator to emphasize even more.
And I added some, so like for instance, Jesse Tuck skips rocks when he's talking, and then that forms the ripples. Or I added a pinwheel in it that sort of is cohesive throughout the story as like a marker of that spinning, spinning wheel. And this is just, and even when the wheel stops, like there's some references where if you look carefully, they're half circles at those moments. So, I'm just trying to really emphasize that theme.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I want to go back through, and now that you've—now that I've read it, I want to go back through and find all the circles. It's almost like a treasure hunt through the book. And that's what I was thinking as I was reading it, because I did read it pretty quickly because I was preparing for the interview. But I could imagine, you know, a tween or a teen just lingering on each beautiful page and, you know, seeing the circles or seeing like the broken wagon wheel here to the random page that I just opened and really finding meaning in it. I mean, I guess this is a terrible thought actually, but I can imagine someone like cutting pages out of the book and putting them on their wall because they're just so gorgeous and certain pages might be meaningful to people as they find, you know, symbolism in them.
K. Woodman Maynard: I mean, that's the hope that people, you know, interact with your book in that way and want, you know, want to continue interacting with it. Personally, when I read graphic novels, I often read them twice, because the first time I'm often too focused on the words, I feel like, or just, you know, absorbing the story. And then if I really like it, I'll read it a second time and really linger.
But that's an interesting thing that people actually read graphic novels in very different ways. You know, some people are much more word focused, some people are image focused. Some people kind of take it all in. Like it's, I like that in graphic novels, you can move at your own pace, unlike in film or animation.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. You told me to remind you to talk about how you had trouble with grammar in sixth grade and how it came back to bite you when you were working on this book.
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, so I talk a little bit in the end of my book about how I had undiagnosed learning disabilities that I didn't find out until late in high school, and so I really struggled learning certain things, especially related to short-term memory or like learning a rule. Which grammar has a lot of rules. And that was really hard for me in sixth grade. And I remember, like, I would get the answers correct because I read a lot, but I wouldn't be able to answer why they were right. And so I would get these bad grades, and it frustrated me so much, and I had such low self-esteem about my intelligence that I was like, oh, this means I'm bad at English. You know? Whereas it's like, no, I was just bad at grammar rules.
And, you know, you move on in school and people don't really care as long as you're getting it right. Like that you occasionally get these things wrong or that you don't know the meaning. And so, you know, fast forward many decades and I handed in my script for Tuck and, you know, very excited working with this publisher for the first time and got the script back, and they had great feedback. You know, all these things. But throughout, I could see all the edits of every time I got my possessive plurals wrong. So, like the Tuck's cabin, you know, like the S apostrophe cabin. I would always do, you know, apostrophe S because I just never could remember it. And even for this podcast, I was asking my husband, I was like, “It's this, isn't it?” Like I just can't, it just doesn't, certain things just don't sink in. And anyway, it was so funny because I was so embarrassed by this.
Mignon Fogarty: That's what copy editors are for. I mean, you're making sure that people are employed.
K. Woodman Maynard: Right, right. Yeah. But it is interesting with grammar in graphic novels because we have speech bubbles, and often you split maybe sentences or paragraphs into different speech bubbles, and it can be an odd thing to choose, you know, if you have an em dash and then the next segment is in a different speech bubble, it can kind of look funny. Do you capitalize the next one or do you keep it lowercase or, you know, commas similarly? And so, when I'm making comics for myself, I actually sometimes won't use punctuation like a comma in the middle. You know, if I have a sentence that's in multiple sections, there should be a comma there, but it just looks so strange that I won't do it. And I feel like the speech bubbles separate and act as commas, but I don't think in a graphic novel like this, I wouldn't be able to get away with that with the copy editors.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it reminds me of something that someone told me about speech bubbles in text messaging is that a lot, the reason that people don't put periods at the end of their text messages is because the bubble itself defines the unit, and you don't have to say that's the end because it is. It is the end because you've pushed send.
And I thought that was so revealing to me. So maybe it's the same for comics, you know? And so we were talking, you were talking about, you know, the rules of grammar. Are there rules of comics that you have to learn and follow?
K. Woodman Maynard: I think one of the biggest things are like reading order, you know, just like how people read across the page. And so if you know, you read left to right and then top to bottom, and this feels very intuitive, but I see—I work also as a comics coach, so I help creators, you know, improve their comics. And I see beginning creators often just don't put the speech bubbles in the correct place. And so people don't know which order they should be reading the text in, and that can just lead to so much confusion or just the meaning doesn't come through. So that's one of, I think, the biggest rules.
Mignon Fogarty: That's really interesting. And then with traditional grammar, you know, often in fiction, people break the rules to achieve a tone or a style or to represent a character. Are there examples like that in comics where there are traditional rules, but then you break them for creative reasons sometimes?
K. Woodman Maynard: Oh yeah. I mean, I think even in that reading order example, like if you really wanted it to be chaotic, you know, a page where the reader can't, you know, like, or the protagonist can't figure out where their mind is going, or you know what to do next—you could put all the bubbles in different places so that the reader has the same experience as the character where they don't know either. But yeah, there are a lot of examples of that, and I think with panel borders, it can be exciting. You know, if you're using a very strict, just standard grid throughout your book, and then suddenly you have a page where you completely break it and are doing weird things with it, it's going to have a much bigger impact than if you're doing that throughout the book.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that's very cool. I love that. So, you talked about being a comics coach, and you have a whole website where you post about comics called Creating Comics. Let's talk a little bit about that and what you do there.
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, so it's a Substack newsletter called Creating Comics that goes out every week, and it's free. And I try to help artists or people create more and feel less bad about themselves in the process. So, there's a lot kind of about mindset things. Because I think so much of creating is also overcoming these internal barriers that we have that tell us that we're not creative or that we're, you know, not good enough or whatever. So, I kind of deal with those things often through comics.
So, I have a daily diary comic practice, and often I'm sharing one of those diary comics in my newsletter, you know, as I'm thinking through these different mindset things. But I'm also covering things like speech bubbles or page turns, or panel borders. So, it's kind of, I mix it up.
Mignon Fogarty: What are—talk about page turns. What is that?
K. Woodman Maynard: Oh yeah, I love page turns. This is a very, you know, nerdy comic thing, but again, a unique thing to comics is you're really thinking about where you put something on the page to get the reader to turn the page. And so you put something that's very, you know, like, exciting or you don't know what's going to happen at the bottom of the—now I'm like, which side of the—the right page so that you get the reader to turn it. And this sounds really simple, but if you put something really dramatic on the top of the right page, then people will skip over everything that is on the facing page. And so when I'm planning out, like I make this whole kind of blueprint—they're called thumbnails—of my book, but I'm thinking always about where the page turn is.
So, if there's, you know, if somebody gets shot—nobody gets shot in Tuck Everlasting—but if that happened, you would have that happen after the page turned because you want that excitement.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, I just, you know, again, I open randomly and there's, on this one, there's a time when a stranger knocks at the door and like Mother Tuck is going to answer the door at the bottom of the page, and then you want to know who it is. So, you turn the page and, oh, there, it's the evil yellow man.
K. Woodman Maynard: Yes, you got it. Exactly. That's exactly it.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Well, you know, you also said in the back matter that you worked closely with Natalie Babbitt's family. This book is for the anniversary, I think this is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the original book. And you worked, you know, the family had to agree and, you know, how did you work with the family to make sure that you kept the tone and the style that Natalie Babbitt originally put in the book?
K. Woodman Maynard: Yeah, so the estate was rightly concerned that I would be, you know, authentic to Natalie Babbitt's voice because they've also had many adaptations over the years. There was a Hollywood movie in 2002 that Natalie Babbitt was kind of vocal about not being so satisfied. And some Broadway and different things where they've taken some big liberties with the book.
And maybe I should add, I'm not sure if it was that film that Natalie Babbitt wasn't satisfied with, or a previous, like an earlier one. But regardless, there was some dissatisfaction about how it's been adapted and changes that have been made, and so they were most concerned about that. But I feel like I'm a pretty true adapter. I think that this book has been a classic for a reason, and so I'm there to amplify what is already there and to maybe clarify or to make it work better in the medium, but I'm not looking to add a new character or add a plot twist or something—like I am pretty true to it.
And so they were involved in terms of like choosing me; you know, like I had to kind of say what my attitude towards adaptation was and a little bit of sample art. But then also at every stage they and my editors, you know, would approve it. So, like the script or the pencils, which are like the sketches and various things. But I think the most substantial way that they were involved is Lucy Babbitt, the daughter of Natalie Babbitt. We had a wonderful call about the book, and I wanted to hear about her, you know, reflections on it because she's lived with this book for so long, and she was also a teacher and taught it for many years for the correct age group. And so I was really excited to hear from her about how people reacted to it and like what specifically people responded to or what did kids struggle with. And so kids really struggle with the start of the book. And so she said that even when she read it in the class, she'd be like, “Just wait. It's going to get better.”
And so for me, I was like, okay, that was where I really needed to make—just speed it up. And so, you know, I talked to her like, “Is that okay that I'm going to do that?” And she's like, “Oh yes.” And so things like that where it was really helpful.
And just having that knowledge, you know, of she's lived with that book, it's really valuable to think about. Also, like some reflection she had about how each of the Tucks—so it's a family called the Tucks—and each of them has their own perspective on how to live life. And she just mentioned that, and I thought, you know, I want to emphasize that in some way in the book that they each have their own kind of way of viewing the world.
And so what I did is I took their silhouettes. So, each of the characters sort of has a page where they're in silhouette, like those old kind of Victorian silhouettes that you'd see. And then behind that is some sort of pattern that reflects who they are, like a quilt or drops of water. And then the text kind of goes around that.
And so that's like a way that I can use the graphic novel to emphasize sort of that theme, which, you know, she picked up in the book, but I don't know that necessarily most readers would notice.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. Just it's such a gorgeous, compelling, beautiful book. I really enjoyed it. Again, it's called Tuck Everlasting: The Graphic Novel by K. Woodman Maynard, who we just talked with. K., thank you so much for being here.
K. Woodman Maynard: Thank you so much for having me.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Where can people find you online?
K. Woodman Maynard: Sure. On Instagram and TikTok, I'm @WoodmanMaynard, which is my last name: W-O-O-D-M-A-N-M-A-Y-N-A-R-D. And then on Substack, I'm Creating Comics.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Well, for our grammarians, we're going to have a bonus episode where we get K.'s book recommendations, which I just can't wait to hear. So, look for that in your feed. For the rest of you, that's all. Thanks for listening.