Great Battling Gatsbys! Two Interpretations Of An American Classic Are Headed To The Bookshelf

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece The Great Gatsby, on a lot of people’s short list for the greatest American novel, entered the public domain in 2021 as the clock ticking down on its copyright finally hit zero. Not coincidentally, we are about to see publication of two graphic novel adaptations of the masterwork, showcasing contrasting approaches to interpreting the book for contemporary audiences.

The Great Gatsby: The Essential Graphic Novel (Clover Press) by writer Ted Adams and artist Jorge Coehlo, plays it straight, with a classical-minded approach to the material. Clover is currently running a Kickstarter to fund publication of the collected edition following a limited release of individual issues.

Gatsby (AWA Studios) written by Jeremy Holt, drawn by Felipe Cunha, and colored by Dearbhia Kelly, radically reimagines the Roaring (19)20s original as an LGTBQIA-led, racially diverse graphic novel set in present day Long Island. That edition will be available starting in early May in print and digital form. Each offers today’s readers something new to consider in a classic that is at once timeless but also indelibly associated with a specific moment in history.

As most Americans who took high school English are at least vaguely aware, The Great Gatsby tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant Long Island socialite with a mysterious past, driven by desperate desire for his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel traces tensions between the ambitions of America’s rising self-made entrepreneurs and the intractable snobbery of the old class system, against the backdrop of rapidly loosening social and sexual mores. It literally defines “the Jazz Age” as a cultural and historical moment.

While the elegant art deco and hot jazz trappings of the 1920s have receded into history, the central figure of Gatsby himself – an emotionally-needy striver from outside the elite circles of society trying to crash the party through self-mythologizing bluster and ostentatious displays of wealth – feels rather current. Both new graphic interpretations lean heavily into that in their own way.

“Gatsby explores the meaning of the American dream,” said Adams. “There’s a line in the book that ‘Tom and Daisy were careless people,’ with the implication they can get away with it because of their money. When you look around the world at the billionaire class and how they use their wealth, that’s still a conversation that we’re having.”

Adams, the co-founder and former CEO of IDW Entertainment before cofounding, then stepping away from, Clover Press, says adapting The Great Gatsby was his dream project, and may well be his swan song in the comics industry.

As Clover’s publisher at the project’s inception, he gave himself enough space and time to realize the book the way he wanted. Adams said he hewed as closely as possible to the original to capture the beauty of Fitzgerald’s prose and pacing. Artist Coelho’s gorgeous drawings evoke the classical 1920s illustrators, with careful reference to get the period details correct.

Holt and Cunha take the opposite approach, using the basic theme, characters and structure of the novel as a template but reimaging every detail in the context of 21^st century characterizations, dialogue, social attitudes and demographic diversity. This story features teenage versions of all of the key characters and updates the period trappings to include the Internet, social media addiction, dark web bootlegging, and the proliferation of online identity creation, deletion, and theft. In this telling, “middle-class Singaporean student Lu Zhao is invited to spend a summer on Long Island with his rich cousin Tommy, before attending Columbia University in the fall. His assimilation into the opulent American lifestyle straps him into a collision course fueled by designer drugs, sex, deceit, and murder.”

Devotees of the original will likely find the revisionist approach jarring, as will readers who take knee-jerk offense at attempts to broaden representation in media. Those who can look beyond the superficialities are rewarded with Holt and Cunha’s distinct and personal interpretation of the classic.

“Like many readers around the world, I fell in love with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as soon as I read it,” said series creator and writer Jeremy Holt, a nonbinary Korean-American. “Fitzgerald’s writing inspired me to create my own version of this iconic story, but I wanted to make sure I included themes from my own life and experiences and make it relatable for younger audiences that are unfamiliar with this story. There aren’t nearly enough queer and multicultural narratives portrayed in entertainment, so I was really focused on crafting a story centered on proper and authentic representation.”

Cunha’s art pulses with vivid colors and references that are as contemporary as Coehlo’s are classical. The two diametrically opposed interpretations find an inch of common ground through relatively similar renditions of Gatsby’s Long Island mansion. Reading the two books side by side, this setting feels like one of those nexus points where alternate realities intersect. In all other ways, it is up to the tastes of individual readers to decide which way of telling the story resonates best with them.

We have America’s idiosyncratic copyright laws to thank for this choice of distinctive and worthwhile creative visions published more or less simultaneously. The very, very long period of rights ownership on Gatsby finally expired in 2021, along with every book published in the US before 1926. With each passing year, more work that is recognizably modern – and some that has rarely been out of the public eye thanks to licensed media deals – will enter the public domain and offer itself up to reinvention by current-day creators.

As they do, we 21st century readers will remain, in Fitzgerald’s timeless coda, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”