The Stand: Captain Trips

Making graphic adaptations of beloved books is a tricky business. Firstly, you need to take the overall feeling of the story and translate it to another media. Adaptation is hard on several fronts. Firstly, the source material can be pictured in a million different ways. Then the tonality of the source material needs to come across similarly. Usually, when dealing with adaptations, this leads to lackluster storylines, missed narratives, and an overall picture that is duller than the source material. There is a similar problem with adapting movies from books. A movie is rarely better than the sourcebook. 

That is why this graphic representation was such a treat. This adaption is about as good as it gets for graphic novel adaptations. It is faithful to the original story, it gets the character's right, and most importantly, it got the desperate, hopeful, and slightly scary feel of the book. The Stand, next to The Gunslinger, is King's opus. It is a tome at 1152 pages. A lot is going on, and this novel did it just right. Adapter Aguirre-Sarcasa cut the fluff that was not integral to visual representation, kept the important stuff, and kept the compelling narrative. The only reason it got four instead of five is that I wanted more story. I am missing some parts of the original story in the adaption. But that is entirely my opinion. 

If you are a King fan, this is great. Even if you aren't, it is well done and worth checking out.