Resisting the Author-itarian Systems: From M. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to R. Nault’s Handmade Graphic Novel

By Chris Reyns-Chikuma

To Joyce

“L’adaptation est un processus étagé” (Baetens, “Lire des adaptations” 24)

“It is possible for critics to grant legitimacy to a comic without budging from their literary attachments” (Pizzino 194)

Introduction

Before being selected to create the graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (hereafter THT) first published in 1985, Renée Nault was known mainly as a Canadian illustrator, not as a comics artist. Although recognized as a good one, she was not yet famous. Hence, the usual dialogue between the unknown artist, the celebrated writer and the powerful publisher can be seen as quite unequal. In this article, I show how, despite that unequal power, Nault resisted the two author-itarian systems she was facing. As applied to society, a system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other “whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.” (Parsons 5–6) The literary system with its Authorship is one of the systems that work at the economical and symbolic levels in the Western modern and contemporary society.

The first system that Nault resisted is literary since Atwood is an Author whose books are part of the literary canon, and more specifically so her novel, THT. Nault’s version might be considered inferior to the novel for two reasons. The first reason is that for most people an adaptation is necessarily not as good as the original (Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation 2–5). The second reason is that it is adapted to a media, comics, that is still seen as inferior (Pizzino 194).¹ The second system Nault had to resist is the conventional comics system, shaped by producers’ and consumers’ expectations about what comics should be—namely, a medium defined by grids, speech balloons, and onomatopoeia. I argue that Nault’s poly-sensual graphic novel, characterized by bright colours, deconstructed panel-page layout, an embossed cover, and the recurring representation of hands, asserts itself as an original, handmade graphic tale and resists the logic of adaptation that would subordinate it to a printed literary masterpiece.

In this article, I first present the issues of adaptation from literature to comics. Then, I show how Nault resisted these two systems in various ways that are specific to comics such as adapting narratological structures and using a creative drawing style, colour code and panel layout, and an embossed cover. After adding more examples of resistance. I conclude that if the novel emphasizes two central elements, the System and Resistance, the graphic novel does the same, while expressing them through the techniques and materiality of a different medium. To reach this conclusion, I draw on close reading, interviews with the artists and other actors in the literary and comics worlds, concepts from adaptation studies such as fidelity and its critique, and historical, semiotic, and sociological studies of comics and literature, including work on legitimacy, the comics system, and publishing worlds.

In THT, the government of the United States has been overthrown by a theocratic regime called Gilead founded on rigid Christian-Puritan principles including the disempowerment of women. The narrative is told by Offred, the first-person narrator whose previous name was probably June. She recalls her restricted life at the Rachel and Leah Center, a training camp for handmaids. Women were selected as handmaids first if they had sinned and second if they were still of fertile age. They were then placed into commanders’ homes, where they were forcibly prepared to have sexual relations with their Master and trained to carry the babies for the wives who, in this post-apocalyptic world, are infertile. At the end of the novel, readers learn that what is known “today” (in the year 2195) about Offred’s life and the now-defeated regime comes from a series of cassette tapes discovered hidden within a wall and later transcribed into the manuscript the reader has just finished.

By 2019, when the graphic adaptation was published, Margaret Atwood was firmly established as a world-famous author. She had repeatedly appeared on the list of candidates for the Nobel prize in Literature and had long been part of the Canadian canon. Within her huge, prolific work, The Handmaid’s Tale occupies a central place because of its popular success and its significant use in high schools and universities in Canada, the United States and much beyond. In contrast, in 2019, Renée Nault was known by a very niche audience as an illustrator. She had published a comics online, Witchling,² but webcomics had (and still have) very limited audience and she temporarily abandoned it to dedicate herself to the adaptation of Atwood’s novel. The graphic novel follows the novel’s plot closely, but the reading experience differs markedly because of its use of colour, and as I argue in my paper, its original, visual and material, adaptation (see fig. 0).

Adaptation Issues

Two Stories of One Tale/Tape

Most readers of Nault’s 2019 graphic novel are aware of its status as an adaptation, as this is stated on the cover.³ On the surface, the two stories are the same. Despite the general discourse about adaptation where the adapted text must be as faithful as possible to the original, Nault’s original adaptation could be seen as relatively successful. For example, on Amazon.ca, 2,875 customers left reviews, and the average rating is 4.3 out of 5 (April 2025). The debate over adaptation, and specifically of literary works to other media, has been around for a long time and is complex.⁴ However, it is important to recognize that arriving at a clear notion of adaptation itself is not easy. As Canadian literary scholar and adaptation expert, Linda Hutcheon has written:

Anyone who has ever experienced an adaptation (and who hasn’t) has a theory of adaptation, conscious or not. I am no exception. A Theory of Adaptation is one attempt to think through not only this continuing popularity but also the constant critical denigration of the general phenomenon of adaptation—in all its various media incarnations. (xi)

Atwood herself approved of this adaptation of the graphic novel and adaptation in general. Actually, adaptation itself has been a main topic for Atwood herself as made explicit by many academic studies (Scarano). Similarly, in Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (1993), Sharon Wilson shows how important the notion of adaptation is for understanding her work. Wilson shows also how Atwood uses adaptation to give a critical perspective on some traditional conservative narratives, ideas or concepts. To give one example, in The Handmaid’s Tale, one can easily read an adaptation of the “Little Red Riding Hood” fighting patriarchy’s wolf. Adaptation for Atwood is then understood as Hutcheon defines it: “with a perverse de-hierarchizing impulse, a desire to challenge the explicitly and implicitly negative cultural evaluation of things like postmodernism, parody, and now, adaptation” (12).

Adaptation is also a main theme in Atwood’s novel. On the narrative level, the story tells the gradual forced adaptation of June to the patriarchal Christian-Puritan system and her resistance to its authoritarian order. On a metanarrative level, her story was first recorded on a tape and then adapted to a manuscript by not so objective, empathetic male historians. In my article, I will focus mostly on this second level.

Linda Hutcheon in her “postface” to Adapting Margaret Atwood (2019) emphasizes that

[f]ew writers allude [to], cite, and transform others’ work with such brio; even fewer manage at once to respect and to contrast both the priority and the authority of those earlier writers’ works in the way that she does. Atwood provocatively challenges the hierarchical implications behind the idea of ‘fidelity’ to a ‘source’, because her adaptations may be second but they are never secondary. (251)

This interest in adaptation and intertextuality is made obvious through the many allusions in her text to previous kinds of literature. For example, the training Center is called the Rachel and Leah Center because the biblical story of Rachel and Leah (Genesis 29) is relevant to its function, as already announced by the first of the three epigraphs of the 1985 edition of the novel. Similarly, she refers to other media such as Martin Scorsese’s 1963 short film, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This (Atwood 302; Nault 204), a title that is itself a sentence inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In doing so, Atwood multiplies the levels of intertextuality in her novel.

One of the key issues in traditional adaptation debates is “fidelity to the original.”  This fidelity refers to how closely an adaptation mirrors or reflects its source material. It implies a sense of faithfulness and loyalty to the original, aiming to capture its essence, meaning, and other important aspects. However, achieving fidelity is often challenging and subjective according to expectations in terms of content and/or formal aspects. One can read issues of fidelity everywhere in The Handmaid’s Tale reflecting these debates on adaptation: from fidelity to God (the supposed original creator) to fidelity to the original sacred Text, the Bible. Fidelity is also constantly subverted by the Gileadean elite members themselves, and by the anti-Gileadean Resistance, a resistance that encompasses various groups and individuals working to undermine or overthrow the oppressive Republic of Gilead. If the degree of Fidelity refers to the degree of literal belief in the original sacred “Text,” the supposedly oral word of a supernatural entity called God adapted in what is nowadays the Bible as a book, this Gileadean elite is obviously hypocritical. For example, at least twice, the representatives of the authorities (e.g., an Aunt and the Commander) misquote the Text (Nault 96⁵), adapting it [un]consciously to their situation, i.e., their interest.⁶ Similarly, without even mentioning the obvious infidelity of the Commanders and other male elite who frequent secret brothels despite their monogamous ideology, another lack of fidelity could also be seen regarding pregnancy, one of the basic elements of the story. Because the “Wives” cannot have children, that is, cannot be original mothers, they resort to using surrogate mothers, that is, mothers who are going to be denied original motherhood. The authority, the source of that faux fidelity, is also regularly questioned by the Resistance.

However, if Offred’s voice is the voice of the Resistance for readers, “now”, that voice is not presented as authoritative or fully reliable. On the contrary, Offred’s voice is regularly presented through her hesitations about her own story and storytelling in general:

I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance.

If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending […].

It isn’t a story I’m telling. …. (Atwood 44)

As much as her voice questions the authority of the system, her instability renders her own authority questionable. This questioning of her authority is not only understandable on a psychological level; she is traumatized and is re-educated to be weak, dependant, and lacking self-confidence as a woman and as a subject of the Gilead system. For Atwood, this questioning is more of a way to refuse to replace one authority with another one. It questions originality and fidelity in a Derridean way (Derrida). It creates doubts and invites research rather than ready-made truth, process rather than product. It also emphasizes the illusion of the oneness and univocity that the fundamentalist Gileadean interpretation is advocating and trying to produce. Moreover, readers “hear” the copy of her voice, through the tape, creating a new distance between the reader and Offred’s spoken voice.

The Tape Story

Furthermore, Atwood’s written text is also presented in the “Historical Notes” as an adaptation of an oral/aural source through the “found tapes” literary device. The fictional historian Pieixoto said in the “partial transcript” (Atwood 343) presented in the novel: “I say soi-disant because what we have before us is not the item in its original form. Strictly speaking, it was not a manuscript at all when first discovered and bore no title” (Atwood 345). Readers are aware that what we know about the past comes from historical sources like “old manuscripts.” The “found manuscript” has also become a common literary device to frame a past fictional event, conceal its fictionality and suggest authenticity.⁷ However, the tape device is quite unusual. First, it is rare both in history and in literature. It might be seen also less realistic and since THT is speculative fiction, the reader can also speculate on the choice of the materiality of that source. From a historical and realistic point of view, it is not by chance that most sources would come as written on paper. Once a person is minimally educated, for the historical (real or fictional) witness, paper and pen are the easiest technologies to use even in our (post)industrial society.⁸⁹

So, the question is, despite its weaker plausibility in a fiction that presents many signs of realism (Goggin 162), why tapes? I argue that among the ways Atwood uses her many sources, this tape device is how she emphasizes the already-second-ness of her novel. The found tape  reinforces the idea not only of adaptation but more precisely of transmedia adaptation, which should not be a surprise if one knows that Atwood is, and was already by 1984, a polymath.¹⁰ Finally, since Atwood is famous for her puns (see on Atwood 343: “Denai Nunavit” as “deny none of it”), we can read one in the word “tape”. Tape refers directly to a magnetic device (the cassette tape, typical technology of the 1980s when the story was written), it also means “a long, narrow strip of material that is sometimes sticky on one side” (Cambridge Dictionary online). This second meaning refers to how the dictatorial system works, muting everyone, a fact that is overwhelmingly present in this narrative with one direct reference to the past (Nault 97). That tape as a muting devise means using it to shut a mouth.¹¹ These two meanings are presented in the novel as two faces of the same coin, the system (tape-censoring-muting) and its resistance (tape-bearing witness-testifying) and are placed next to each other in the same sentence in the “Historical Notes” (Atwood 346; italics mine): “Within this footlocker, which was sealed with tape of the kind once used on packages to be sent by post, were approximately thirty tapes cassettes, ….” ¹²

The Systems

Offred’s tapes show the possibility of resistance against the Gileadean totalitarian system like this graphic novel shows the readers the possible resistance against the two author-itarian systems, literature and comics. In the 60s, the years Atwood became an adult, everything had been studied and presented as a system mainly in connection with the intellectual current called structuralism. Within that structuralist way of thinking, there was not much place for individualism and resistance. These structuralist thinkers have been criticized for tending towards radical pessimism for leaving little or no room for resistance against the system, e.g., in politics, totalitarianism. After describing torture as the way of imposing power in an authoritarian system, Michel Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish (1977) that in modern societies, power is implemented through both the panopticon and the interiorization of power (195). The reader can see all three techniques in Atwood’s novel. From the Salvaging (a form of public execution, Atwood 305) to the panopticon (the device, concrete and abstract, to see [-opticon] everything [pan-]; Nault 18)¹³ to the techniques of forced interiorization through, for example, the prohibition of talking freely and the enforced repetition of ritual formulas (“Praise be”). Some thinkers, however, develop ideas around the concept of resistance (see “micro-resistance” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). Foucault’s concept of resistance is the most interesting in trying to understand Nault’s position. Resistance, for Foucault, is not a separate force opposing power, an external force, but an inherent and inseparable aspect of power relations that arises within the dynamics of power itself, manifesting as diverse forms of struggle and subversion. He believes that where there is power, there is also the possibility of resistance, and that these two are intertwined. This type of reading could be applied to Atwood’s Gilead story world. Resistance could also be used as a synonym of Hutcheon’s concepts of “deconstructor, demystifier, perverse de-hierarchizing impulse” (xii). But I want to apply the resistance to the notion of adaptation and especially Nault’s adaptation. In and by her adaptation, Nault puts in place a resistance to two cultural systems that for a long time tended to marginalize or even erase resistance to their cultural power.

The Literary System

Adaptation was long considered inferior because it is a copy of an original (Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation xii-xiii; 2–5). This is even more the case when that original piece of literature is part of the canon. Atwood’s canonical status, and that of her novels, can be demonstrated in various ways. For instance, English-speaking publisher Random House published Atwood’s novel within the imprint Vintage Classics next to texts by Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison among many other canonized Authors.¹⁴ The graphic novel adaptation highlights the canonized original by placing the name of the original Author, Atwood, at the top of the cover and in big characters. Nault, the author of the comics, is written at the bottom and with small characters, barely visible. I do not argue that this emphasis on the original Authorship on the cover is the result of Atwood’s request. On the contrary, it is important here to distinguish between the individual author and the system of Authorship.¹⁵ There is clear evidence that Atwood is not against comics. She herself participated several times in the production of comics: first in the 1980s with some comic strips,¹⁶ and most recently, in 2016, with Angel Catbird and with War Bears which is also a meta-comics.¹⁷ What I try to highlight here is that the system of Authorship created that type of  cover with that type of ideology dominated by both the Authorship system and the marketing imperative. Nault had no explicit way to resist against the literary system, since the cover was, as it is usually the case, outside of her role and power.¹⁸ The role of the author of a cover is usually given to a specialist, a designer, as Gérard Genette shows in his thorough study, Paratexts, especially if the author is new in the field (23–36). The cover is also done by such a specialist because the cover is a key element to advertise the book, and the name of a famous author like Atwood was rightly seen as crucial to sell the book. However, if Nault’s power, as new in the field, was quite limited,¹⁹ she had other ways to resist as we are going to see further.

The Comics System

Similarly, one can say that there is a comics system imposing its rules on the way comics have been produced and received. Unlike the literary system, the comics system is traditionally based much less on Authorship, and more on some other conventions. These conventions are stereotypes, based on the popular belief that “comics” implies and must include some features such as onomatopoeias, speech balloons, panels, regular static layouts, either funny characters or superheroes. In the United States, all these characteristics were reinforced by the 1954 famous Senate Comic Book Subcommittee Hearings and the Comics Code Authority drafted by the comics industry to format its products for a certain audience, mostly kids and young teens, within a conservative ideology.²⁰ Of course, there was resistance very early (e.g., the MAD magazine) but these alternative comics remained marginal until recently. Comics scholars and literary academics in general tend to ignore how these conservative ideas are still prevailing outside universities, that is, for the majority of the population.²¹

Resistance and Adaptation

On the other hand, as has been emphasized most recently by Erin La Cour and Rik Spanjers in their introduction to a special issue of Image & Narrative, resistance has been a leitmotiv within the comics communities trying to avoid the mainstream, stereotypical representations of comics.²² I argue that Nault, herself marginal to the comics world since she was an illustrator and not originally a comics artist, used the tools that were available to her to inscribe her work within that resistance philosophy.²³

Roughly, there are two types of adaptation: one focusing on plot and characters (mostly didactic and commercial with less regard to the art) and the other one focusing more or as much on techniques (mostly in the artsy, auteurist circles). In THT, the characters and the plot are important, but Atwood’s style is equally crucial. As a writer, her style is her way of constructing stories (e.g., layered narratives) and her way of playing with categories like the genre (science fiction, speculative fiction, …). More peculiarly in contrast with Nault’s visual narrative, Atwood is meticulously attentive to language, shown through the poetic rhythm of her work and her many creative puns (Nischik; Kuhn).

If translating the narrative is relatively easy, translating the style from the literary to the multimodal system is more difficult to do. This comics system is also harder to understand without artistic and media education. This difficulty comes mainly from the fact that to understand comics one needs to know the arts of writing and drawing and even more how to mix them, to make them interact. Being a specialist of literature does not guarantee that one can appreciate the visual art techniques of the new medium. Hence, some people do not accept the graphic novel because they do not find the same stylistic traces that are peculiar to writing, and specifically Atwood’s powerful writing style, in the graphic art adaptation.

When source material is adapted to a target medium, both content and the form are expected to be adapted. In this case, the content is quite simple: it tells the story of feminist resistance to a religious fundamentalist patriarchal system called Gileadean.²⁴ But it is important to acknowledge that the presence of resistance in the story is largely enabled by the use of a first-person narrative. This technique is one of the formal elements that is not easy to adapt to other media as the relative “failure” of the 1990 Schlöndorff-Pinter movie adaptation shows (see Hutcheon, “Adapting (to) Atwood” 254-255).²⁵ In Nault’s comics, the personal value of the “I” is going to be expressed through the fact that the characters are (an imitation of) handwritten characters.

Adapting the form is often more difficult. There are two ways to describe the form of the novel: a general structure (e.g., the order of the units, the I-narrator), and specificities of the media-art novel (more linguistic related like puns). While the general structure is the same in both media in this case,²⁶ the specificities of each media implies some changes. This is obvious since we go from printed words aligned on page after page to images-texts where both, images and texts, are fragmented: images in some types of panels (framed, implicit, bleeding, …) and texts reduced and placed in various specific formats like balloons and caption boxes (that in this case are sometimes explicit, framed, but mostly, unframed) (see Fig. 0).

The difficulty in adapting a media-art to another is that the form often reflects the content, and reciprocally. More radically, one can say that there is no content without form (Lefevre). Hence, it is necessary to find a new form that expresses the same or similar concordance between the content and form. The form could be compared to a system. If the novel has been theorized as a “system” (i.e., a set of rules with which the author can play) by narratology and semiotic studies, comics have been described and analyzed according a different set of constrains by comics theorists such as Thierry Groensteen in his Système de la bande dessinée (1999; translated as The System of Comics, 2009). In the following sections, I establish a parallel between the two systems, the one in the story (Gilead dictatorship) and the one structuring the story in both media, the novel and the graphic novel. I then analyze the way Nault succeeds in adapting the resistance as a theme to the resistance against the two systems, i.e., the authority of novel is a Big Brother²⁷ for the graphic novel and the comics mainstream system is what we could call a Big Brother for any alternative graphic narrative. To resist against the two systems, Nault uses various ways specific to the comics media such as adapting the narratological structures, playing with the panel layout, emphasizing her drawing style and others.

System and Resistance

Adapting Narratological Structures

Resistance is the counterpart to the System.²⁸ In THT, there are two kinds of Resistance: the heroic Resistance movement (Mayday), whose traces/testimony has been lost according to the historian Pieixoto (Atwood 348–349). The movement is known only through June’s testimony which is based mostly on rumours and unconfirmed information; and the non-heroic one, that we can “see” through the “I”, or June, that will be able to testify later.²⁹ June’s voice has to work within the possible cracks of that system, to resist without being caught. Her resistance is also mentioned all throughout the narrative, for example:

Everything except the wings around my face is red: the colour of blood, which defines us. […] [T]he white wings too are prescribed issue. They are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen. I never looked good in red, it’s not my colour. (Atwood 8-9, slightly modified in Nault 9; italics mine)

The italicized words are an ironic expression, and irony allows Offred to say one thing and mean something entirely different which is one of the ways she manages her predicament.

Similarly, facing the literary and comics Systems, Nault’s resistance cannot be expressed too explicitly and must navigate around two fires if it wants to be read by many and not be perceived as too commercial or too avant-garde. Nault, like June, also has to work within the possible cracks of the two systems.³⁰

Overall, the overarching structures are the same in the novel and the graphic novel: the chronology is the same, and both books are divided into fifteen units. However, Nault did not keep the subdivisions in 46 chapters since it would have created a meaningless constraint in a comics (Baroni and Goudmand; Durrenmatt).³¹ Instead, this subdivision in chapters is replaced by other types of fragmentation, i.e., the page and panel that are more intrinsic to comics. As indicated by Baroni and Goudmand, chaptering is historically connected to the legitimization of the media modelled on literature.³² But it is not the main explanation here, since the division is intrinsically related to the alternation between days and nights: the night allowing resisting activities, from dreaming (Atwood 125) or secret communication via lip-reading (Nault 5) to risky resistance such as illicit lovemaking (“sincere,” Nault 206, or prostitutional, Nault 199), running away and “terrorist actions”. Moreover, if the number of pages of the graphic novel (235) is about two-thirds of the novel (358), the quantity of the text kept is about less than one-third which is understandable since a lot of written information is now transformed into images.

The content of this novel is all about resistance to a dictatorship and its panoptical system as described by Michel Foucault in his work, Disciplineand Punish (see Hoffman 29–39), or put another way, resistance of the “I” against the omnipotent Eye (like the “Big Brother” image in 1984).³³ Both the Eye-system and its resistant “I” are presented from the beginning in both media. But the Eye and its effect are presented visually as early as the very first pages (see fig. 1 above). It is a double-page spread bleed that follows the description in the novel. It shows all beds perfectly aligned as a grid in a huge space that the text tells us is an old gymnasium as revealed by the old multi-sport game lines on the floor. The alignment of the beds makes the page appear as a grid. Therefore, it also reflects the traditional page layout of comics usually called the grid. However, it does it in an oblique way, literally and metaphorically, that is, also contesting the conventional comics layout which is traditional straight and not oblique. Three female guardians walk along the alleys between the beds, and these alleys could appear as the comics gutters. All, including the guardians-watchers, are “watched” by a huge, overhanging winged-Eye drawn on the wall. This winged-Eye is a main symbol of the male-gendered System, like the “Big Brother” image was for George Orwell’s novel 1984. This double-page picture represents a form of panopticon. If the panopticon is thus central in this autocratic system as shown in both the novel and the graphic novel, like most dictatorships, this Puritan one uses both the old ostentatious violent repression (e.g., “Salvaging”) and the newer control-oriented techniques (e.g., the panopticon described by Foucault).

Adapting the Text

Contrary to the Schlöndorff-Pinter movie, Nault understood that keeping the “I” was essential. The “I” is the voice of resistance, and in the story,³⁴ the only witness that the readers have of that era, with all her hesitations, confusions, weaknesses and strengths. As a literary device, it is also the most effective way to have the reader-viewer identify with the first-person narrator (Shalom and Gross). In this case, it also expresses a resistance to the genre as gendered and as a unique narrative category since one cannot easily say if it is “science fiction, dystopic nightmare, futuristic prophecy, slave narrative or satiric romance” (Macpherson 53).

Like in the novel, the “I” is first present[ed] as part of a “we” in the graphic novel. But contrary to the novel, in the graphic novel the “we” is not the first word. It is preceded by the words referring to “The Red Center” (Nault 2), that is, the name given by the handmaids to the Rachel and Leah Centre. This Red Center is the concrete local form of the System. But these two words are followed right away by the “we”: “The Red Center. We …” (Nault 2). Furthermore, the “I” is presented only in the following chapter, “Shopping” (Nault 7). This makes the “we” against the system more important than the “I.” In feminist theories (Morris 11), naming some sisters before naming herself (Nault 6) is important to emphasize sisterhood over individualist feminism.

One can see that other parts of the text are also modified. First, the graphic novel does not use all the text of the novel. Some parts have been simply eliminated. Nault explains this selection of parts of the text in a rather subjective, vague manner (Deliée). More concretely, the adaptation of a written text to a visual form allows artists to get rid of parts of the text simply because the description of the physical constituents of the storyworld like characters, buildings, and furniture, are not necessary since it can be shown. However, one can see that it is not that simple since Nault does quote some of the descriptions. For example, she enumerates the furniture of “her” room on page 6. In this case, Nault lays out the words on the page just the way she enumerated the names of her “sisters” in what could be called a poetic way, the traditional verse lines. However, the quote is not verbatim. Especially, its format is quite different. Nault organizes the three words like she had done it with the sisters’ names, in a spatial way, below the image of two hands moving toward each other, expressing emotional solidarity in the dark of night.

In comics, text alignment is radically different from the text in the novel. While the print page of a novel is uniform, it is not in comics. Moreover, Nault presents her text blocks both in a way that follows the traditional comics conventions and in what one might call a poetic way. Playing with the text in comics is common, almost since its beginning, like playing with the size, boldness, and even the colours of the letters. In this case, the character type is an imitation of handwritten texts (Gerbier). This handwriting creates a more personal, more authentic allure. This type of handwriting is absent from all printed novels in general and is instead expressed through the first-person narration in Atwood’s novel. But on top of these ludic techniques, Nault also spatializes the text. After cutting down Atwood’s text, Nault first places the words according to some basic comics rules. Hence, the dialogues are placed in balloons, and the voice-over is placed in caption boxes which could be explicit (where the frame is literally drawn. See Nault 7) or, most often, implicit (i.e., the frame is not visible, but its limits are still clear. Also see Nault 7). The goal is to space out the text, to let the text breathe, and not overwhelm the image/s. But Nault also presents her text in a way that corresponds to the poetic layout as explained by Brian McHale (28). This poetic layout means that, instead of using the regular alignment of each line in a printed novel, Nault uses irregular short lines. McHale calls that technique “segmenting the narrative,” that is, laying the selected short pieces of the long text as stanzas hanging all over the page between and slightly overlapping with images as one can see from the very first pages (Nault 2–3, and more obviously 5–6).

Nault uses the same poetic technique for her protagonist’s thoughts. Even in her thoughts, resistance is not simple. Thought does not exist independently from its context. And reality can change one’s thoughts not only because of fear, suspicion, and spying opportunities, but also because of the techniques used by totalitarian regimes. Such techniques include not allowing self-expression and dialogue but replacing them with formulaic phrases repeated again and again such as “blessed be the fruit” or “praise be.” However, the kitchen scene, where two servants talk about things they should not, shows free expression is impossible to repress absolutely (Nault 11). They are lucky that it is Offred who overhears them as she is not going to denounce them. Similarly, the scene depicting Offred’s first encounter with the driver, Nick, shows her thoughts, emphasizing the doubts about a possible complicity-solidarity in a poetic way and accentuating the anaphora (“perhaps”) and spatialization already present on the printed page of the novel:

Perhaps he was merely

being friendly.

Perhaps it was a test

to see what I would do.

Perhaps he

is an Eye

(Nault 17; Atwood 20; italics mine). 

The interest of that scene is also visual since the wink is not expressed textually, but visually.

Adapting Texts to Images: When the “handmaid” is handmade

The resistance has to exist not only in the words but also be visible in the images. One early example is on page five of the graphic novel where everything is upside down, starting with the bottom at the top and the bottom cut-off. This is an early dressing scene when Offred assembles herself in the uniform of the handmaid. It also shows the resistance to the comics system traditionally putting the top of any element (character, object, …) at the top of the page and the bottom at the bottom. Hence, her unconventional topsy-turvy representation resists the traditional comics convention emphasizing both her resistance against this dress code and the fragmentation of the body of women in that system.

The Drawing Style

Nault’s adaptation of Atwood’s novel is certainly unconventional. Some might say that it is more illustration than graphic narrative. Nault is professionally known for her illustrations, and it is her first published graphic novel. But her adaptation is very interesting because she makes the materiality of the visual art more explicit and visible.³⁵

It is useful to start with a comparison of the cover of Nault’s text with the covers of the many editions of Atwood’s novel. A paradoxical contrast emerges. The image of the handmaid on the cover of the novel is much bigger than the one used for the graphic novel where the handmaid is small and the words are big. Covers are essential to give readers a first impression and to guide their reading (Genette 24). The smallness of the picture is certainly counterintuitive since one would expect a graphic novel to emphasize pictures more or at least not less than words. However, as Genette shows, artists are not often in control of the cover (23–36). Hence, in this case, Nault could not resist what can be seen as one more element of the literary system, here emphasized by the big size of the words in contrast with the small size of the picture. For the publisher, the “big words” was a way to inscribe the comics within the literary system, through the graphic novel.³⁶

However, one can see the cover also as the result of a tension between the two systems and the artist’s resistance. If the image on the cover of the graphic novel is small, it is also embossed. That embossing unavoidably invites the reader-viewer to caress it. The embossing is another way to reinforce the resistance to the literary system by reaffirming the specificity of the visual graphic novel as a handmade, concrete, and sensual product, in contrast with the immateriality of the “mechanicality,” intellectuality, and abstraction of the printed format of the novel. Furthermore, reading a graphic narrative is often reduced to the visual, excluding other senses. But as shown by Ian Hague, reading involves more than the visual, for example, the sense of touch (Comics and the Senses 92–122):

[W]e can begin to develop a new understanding of touch in comics. This understanding will acknowledge the importance of tactile interaction with comics, and thereby overcome the taboo position on touch. At the same time, it will seek to be more precise and analytical  than previous approaches that have indicated the value of touch, eliminating the simplicity of the fetishistic Touch, or, The Taboo/Fetish Character of Comics and Tactile Performance approach and allowing us to understand the uses and value of comics’ tangibility more satisfactorily. (96–97)

This embossing on the cover also emphasizes one of the main themes of this narrative present in the novel and its adaptation, the key role of sensuality as a way to survive and counter the System. Gilead’s authoritarian puritan system reduces human beings to one function: the Commander, the Wife, the Surrogate Mother, enforcers like the Aunts and the Soldier. However, one can read in many passages how all these monologic characters, flattened by the system, painfully miss that multi-sensuality:

In the semi-darkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s hands across space (Nault 5; Atwood 4)

It’s so good, to be touched by someone, to feel so greedy (Nault 81; Atwood 113)

I want you to kiss me. -All right. -Not like that. As if you meant it. (Nault 109; Atwood  161)

Nault herself emphasized that aspect in an interview with Deborah Dundas: “There’s this tactile quality and there’s the quality of accident that the computer can never duplicate.” The embossing also gives a literal third dimension to the characters that in comics are typically presented as two-dimensional. Embossing is also a way to reinforce what specialists in comics have emphasized which is that comics, in contrast with printed text or photo, is heavily mediated through hand-drawing (Lefevre; Hatfield).

In a world where tablets have become common for amateur and professional artists, including Nault, to create their images,³⁷ her drawing and colouring are all ostensibly handmade. This handmade-ness emphasizes further what Philippe Marion calls “graphiation,” a term defined by Jan Baetens in La Cour et al.’s Key Terms in Comics Studies (2022) as: “the fact that the hand and the body—as well as the whole personality of the artist—is visible in the way he or she gives a visual representation of a certain object, character, setting, or event’ […]” (135). Concomitantly, Nault’s work emphasizes its individuality, its resistance to the two systems, the literary system which is all printed, and the comics system which is perceived as all gridded. Contrary to what happens in writing in print, the “hand” of the author in comics remains always visible (Gardner 54). This is also important because within our cultural system where literature is still more legitimate than comics and adaptation is still believed to be secondary, the tendency for many was, and to some extent still is, going to make Nault a handmaid, a servant of the mistress, “Atwood,” and the graphic novel as the handmaid of the novel-literature-sovereign. This handwriting could then be seen as adapting the specificity of first-person narration in Atwood’s peculiar “text-style” (Staels) to Nault’s artistic multimodal-specific form. This is also important because the “individuality-resistance vs the System” on the artistic production-creation level parallels one of the main points of the story which is about the desperate resistance of the I-narratress within the authoritarian dystopic system. It then also adds one reading to the already rich protagonist’s name. If Offred was easily interpreted as “offered,” that is, sacrificed, and “of red” (clothing and blood-maternity), it now can also be interpreted as “off-read”, i.e., a reading that is away-separated-different from the traditional reading way and the opposite of “read off”, that is, dictated from a list or a system.

Such a complex mixture of image and text almost to the point of presenting an anarchical layout encourages slow reading, standing in opposition to the conventional quick reading of a comic book. Hence, if Nault applies the notion of speculative fiction which is one of the ways some, including Atwood, define The Handmaid’s Tale,³⁸ it is in her own way as an artist. Through her own sensual, artistic skills, she proposes an interpretation that also questions the speculation including the biased interpretation of the male professor in the “Historical Notes.” Nault’s artistic sensuality reproduces all the empirical proofs of June’s voice that are there to be experienced through various senses and is the opposite of the “voice” of the professor “heard” through a bookish adaptation (tape to manuscript) and fashioned according to academic conventions such as skepticism and in this case (dubious male) irony. Nault’s adaptation foregrounds Offred’s voice not only by making it the dominant voice in these segments-like strophes hanging on the page between drawings and by frequently depicting her on the pages, but also through the use of beautiful, sensual colours that distances these scenes from the printed black-and-white page.

The Colour Code+

For the colours, Nault follows Atwood’s novel, at least partially. It is impossible not to use the very explicit colour code in Atwood’s novel. Starting with red for the handmaids, it goes on with blue for the Wives, green for the helpers, striped for the poor (Nault 22) and greyish-greenish for the outcasts (190-193). However, Nault adds one main colour, yellow[ish], to distinguish not a class but a period, the past that Offred visits in her memories (see Nault 16). That yellow colour is not as systemic as the other colours, but it is dominant through its recurrence either clearly isolated (e.g., a dress) or mixed within multicoloured scenes. The best scene to represent what it stands for is the juxtaposition of the past and present on the double-page bleeding spread of the graphic novel (see fig. 4). Colour is also used for the background to indicate the atmosphere. Pitch black is often used for the background when the Aunts talk, connotating the darkness of their authoritarian ideology (see fig. 2). In contrast, as it is common in comics, white is used as a background where the décor-setting is not necessary as well as a way to draw attention to the foreground sometimes where a character is talking (see fig. 3).

Moreover, colours have a different impact and meaning according to their materiality. Nault uses watercolour. Some critics such as Rachel Bellwoar criticize the use of watercolour for connotating beauty in a story that is not mainly about beauty. However, the connection between watercolour and beauty is historical. Some artists, such as Charlotte Solomon, use it to paint sad or horrible things.³⁹ In Nault’s case, some elements are far from being beautified by watercolour such as the double-page spread about the authoritarian violence shows (214–217; see fig. 5c). Moreover, in her interview with Jane Van Koeverden, Nault says: “Although the subject matter is bleak, I wanted the art itself to be beautiful, and for each page to stand as its own work. Some scenes were particularly exciting to work on, like the crowd scenes at Jezebels with all the crazy costumes.”

These beautiful scenes alternate throughout with “ugly” representations of the “colony” where greyish hues are used (Nault 190–193) to the salvaging (213–215), the torturing (71), the capture (171–74), the wall-hanging (71) and the shorter and less dramatic scenes (2–3). Finally, the visual multi-sensual multi-colouring is also a way to show June’s continuous hope that keeps her alive, away from the temptation of suicide, perpetrated by June’s former tenant.

If the visual is important as it reflects the importance of the eye through both the Eye and visual witnessing, other senses are also critical. While the word “eye[s]” is present over 100 times in the novel, the number of occurrences of other words like “smell” (70 times), “touch” (40x) and “taste” (10x) prove their relative significance. It is possible to argue that other senses, and sensuality in general, are ways of resisting the system that tries to reduce everyone to one function, one role, and one sense. The text abounds in sensual descriptions such as when Offred describes the scrabble pieces as sweets (Atwood 161; Neault 106). It then subverts the narrowly defined rationality (heralded by the Gilead system with its religious formalistic practices). It is these sensual words that Nault translates into images.

Finally, Nault is originally an illustrator and only became a known graphic novelist with this adaptation. Two of the main differences between illustration and comics are: firstly, illustrations can be removed without changing the meaning of the text (Grove qtd. in La Cour 157); secondly, the use of panels is more systematic in comics.⁴⁰ However, Nault’s style cannot be simply described as illustration. Her illustrations cannot be removed without affecting the story. Each illustration is useful for the narrative. Her style is somewhere between illustration and comics-graphic narratives. Hence, her style could be read as a resistance to the traditional conventional use of colour and layout in comics.

Moreover, Nault grew up reading-viewing comics, and loved drawing and was encouraged to do so since early childhood. She also went to a French elementary school where she was exposed to French bande dessinée (Deliée). In her interview, Nault cites Tintin, Asterix, and Mignola’s Hellboy for the use of the colours⁴¹ and “Taiyo Matsumoto’s works for his page layout so “loose, spontaneous and expressive” (Deliée; Fig. 5abc).⁴² This quotation refers not only to the three comics traditions (Franco-European, American, and Japanese), three groups of audiences (youth, teen, adult), and three styles (from the quite conventional grid and use of colour of Tintin to their unconventional uses in Mignola’s and Matsumoto’s graphic narratives). What this interview also shows is that the graphic novel creates its own intertextuality or in this case “inter-iconicity” (Crucifix), which emphasizes the visual aesthetic form (colour and panel layout) more than the content (plot, characters and literariness like in Atwood’s novel).

The Panel Resistance

The panel is one basic unit in comics. Its use varies from panels with implicit frames to strict rigid grids of regular panels through all other types. There are different sizes of panels, from small to full page including bleeding. Panels can be rectangular, triangular, round, oval or more. Nault uses almost all these shapes according to what she intends to express. Hence, the first panel is the double-page spread representing the system, symbolized by “the Red Center” (2–3) showing a quite regular layout representing the regular life and daily routine. Later, she presents irregular panels reflecting the quick pace and violence of the “salvaging” scene, where handmaids have to attend an execution and forced to participate in it (216–217; see fig. 6). 

At the level of the panel, one can see the third eye (no capital letter in contrast to the Eye of the Gilead secret police) which is the visual I-narrator and focalizer. In comics a narrator tells the story with words and with images. In a first-person narrative, the disjunction between both the words and the image is most obvious when the I-narrator is drawn and shown (see Groensteen, Comics and Narration 79–131).  In Nault’s graphic novel, what viewers see is mostly what June sees or could see. However, the first page analyzed above represents the gymnasium through a hovering perspective that Offred-June cannot have, except if she went upstairs on the “balcony running around the room” (Atwood 3) or through her imagination based on an extrapolation of what she can see. Hence, her perspective and knowledge are limited which is what a traditional dictatorship would want: restrain access to factual information and free fictional expression. Only her imagination can free her and go beyond the limits imposed on her, which is shown through the view beyond her perspective. Finally, I would like to add a layer to Katarzyna Machala’s interpretation of the image on page 18 and repeated twice on pages 123 and 220. As one can see on fig 7b, the perspective is very similar to the panopticon (fig. 7a), an architectural design for a prison proposed by Jeremy Bentham. This similarly visually reinforces the idea of the authoritarian ideology of the Gileadean system in spite of its colourfulness.

Finally, although not easy to distinguish from the first-person narrator’s voice since the story is told through a first-person narrator, Atwood’s voice is also discernible in this story. If it is partly perceived through the I-voice, the I-voice is not Atwood’s voice as a writer. As a writer, her voice can be heard also through the overall structure, and through the framing device, i.e., the “Historical Notes” (Grace). However, in Nault’s version, the framing device is different.

More Examples of Resistance

Beyond what could be called the formal arguments proving how Nault resists the two systems, there are two more arguments coming from the authors’ interviews. The first one is about her different “assigned” audience, the second one might be connected to the author’s age-generation.

Novel for the [un]happy few [adults] vs graphic novel for everybody

Nault had constraints that Atwood did not have: a form of censorship. The first proof of that constraint can be found in a statement given by Nault in an interview:

J’ai fait le choix de ne pas présenter de scènes trop explicites parce qu’on voulait que le livre puisse être lu par tout le monde. Malgré tout cela, ce qui est décrit est horrible. (Bornais)

[I chose not to present too explicit scenes because we wanted the book to be read by everyone. Despite this, what is described is horrible.] (my translation)

There is an ambivalence created by “I chose” [“J’ai fait le choix”] and “we/one wanted” [“on voulait”]. It emphasizes the tension between two unequal forces: individual will and institutional will unnamed. The “on” in French is ambiguous since it could refer to “we” (including her) or “someone/they” excluding her. Anyway, it undeniably includes the publisher. It is thus necessary to know that McClelland & Stewart is a Canadian publisher, now part of an enormous conglomerate corporation, called a Canadian publishing company. It is owned by Penguin Random House of Canada, a branch of Penguin House, the international book publishing division of German media giant Bertelsmann.⁴³ This tension reflects the peaceful opposition within a democracy, between the system and its resistance.⁴⁴ Adaptation, like translation, is seen as a process that is influenced by the power differences between the participants. Here, obviously, Nault’s power position is at least twice inferior to the powerful decision-makers: the quasi “sacred” Authority of Literature in some elite circles until recently, and of Atwood as the Author of the Original, and the Authority of the Big Corporation (“on”). Moreover, the decision-makers in the big company apply the translation-adaptation theory that the novel is adapted to/for a new audience, which is different from the audience of the novel but still dominated by the literary ideology. However, the relatively new audience of the graphic narrative is a construction based more on prejudices than on empirical data.⁴⁵ Furthermore, that type of adaptation does not give voice to resistance but to compliance to the literary and comics systems in spite of the fact that, since Atwood’s novel is about resistance to a system, a minimum of “foreignization,” that is, estrangement, in the adaptation would be appropriate.⁴⁶

Second, the “lu par tout le monde” [read by everybody] is also ambivalent and could refer to either “all ages” or “all the world.” I would argue that it is both. “All ages” implies a minimum of censorship typical of what comics became after the new rules implemented in comics countries like France and Belgium in 1949 and the U.S. in 1954. The “all the world” implies making it part of a “world literature” like the novel had already become much earlier. This world perspective also implies a way of “manipulating” the adaptation to make it readable by “everybody” as Theo Hermans’ anthology The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation (1985) shows.⁴⁷[5] This emphasizes that the powers in control asked Nault to censor herself as alluded to in the above quotation (Bornais), something difficult to imagine in 1985 or nowadays in Canada for a writer, but apparently acceptable for a graphic artist adapting a canonized novel.

Skepticism vs Optimism?

The second submission is to Atwood’s institutional authority. This is demonstrated through the difference of interpretations between Atwood and Nault when Nault answered the question “Did Margaret Atwood give you much feedback?”:

One of the only big edits Margaret gave me is the epilogue at the end. I had initially drawn a female professor to narrate the lecture and she said, ‘No, it’s a man in the book and I think it should stay a man.’ I thought, ‘Oh, that’s very cynical and maybe works better,’ but I had drawn a more optimistic ending. (Van Koeverden)

Atwood thought that it was important that the professor would be a man, not a woman, who would “translate” (mansplain!) June-Offred’s voice. Dominick Grace, after others, discusses the issue of how the framing device could easily be interpreted as patriarchal, especially with a man with dubious sexist jokes. This implies that the patriarchal system is then still alive, and many historical events clearly show that it is the case nowadays (Bennett). But if we use what Nault says in her interview above, Atwood’s version might have been interpreted by Nault differently. Nault’s optimistic version might be because she is younger and/or not as “politically-historically aware” as Atwood is. However, this could be interpreted as her way of resisting the system, by, for example, giving a positive model for her readers. Nault had first drawn a less cynical version but was “forced” to change it back to a less optimistic one.

Resisting? Of Shawl and Tape

While the gender of the professor is outside Nault’s control, she nevertheless avoids Atwood’s skepticism through the brevity of her adaptation of “The Historical Notes”. In these final pages, Nault could be seen as resisting, even if in the modest but still important field of art. Modestly, her drawing in the final “chapter,” the “Historical Notes,” could be interpreted as an act of resistance to the literary system in the form of the graphic novel and for artistic freedom. Nault’s last unit is surprisingly much shorter (three pages against fifteen pages = a fifth). This last chapter is the only one that is so disproportionate to the equivalent unit in the novel since all the others are about two-thirds. Brevity allows Nault to avoid Atwood’s skeptical ironic perspective.

First, Pieixoto is not named in Nault’s but is shown/drawn, which implies that “his” appearance is going to define “him” visually rather than textually. All the sexist puns have been removed. Moreover, on the very last pages, the professor is seen twice: once occupying a quasi-full page but from behind (Nault 236) and the other, face on, but from far away as a small silhouette, which implies in both cases that we do not see “his” face. He also wears what seems to be a decorative dupatta, an Indian scarf-shawl, which makes the professor less of a stereotype of a Western man. Even in Asia the dupatta is more commonly worn by women. Hence, this character is not easily gendered in Nault’s graphic novel.

In the final pages of the graphic novel, a parallel between the tapes and the speech balloons is visually drawn, reinforcing the idea that the words told by the researcher Pieixoto are based on Offred’s words. Although one can emphasize the mediation of Offred’s words on the tape by the male professor, one can also highlight the fact that the original words were/are Offred’s. Without Offred’s account there would be no account by Pieixoto. The difficulty of relying on text is also emphasized by the fact that even the historical notes are explicitly presented as partial. As shown by several critics like Dominick Grace, Pieixoto’s transcribed discourse itself shows biases, most obviously patriarchal in some dubious jokes in the novel. For example, he refers to “enjoying an equally charming Arctic Chair” (345) when describing the female chair who introduced him before his lecture, and he comments on “the Underground Femaleroad,” a play on the historical “Underground Railroad,” which he further rephrases as “the Underground Frailroad.” Therefore, it is not entirely clear that the resistance can claim victory, even if the I-voice has reached the new democratic system and the patriarchal system appears to have ended. This ambiguity is reinforced by the fact that the chair of the colloquium is an Indigenous woman from a Department of Caucasian Studies, which reverses the traditional anthropological dynamic in which white scholars study non-white cultures.

However, visually, Nault’s final double page gives as much importance to the tapes as to the professor’s talk. Moreover, the parallel between the two oral “texts” is emphasized by the fact that both are presented through curves. Furthermore, Nault’s more optimistic idea about women’s voices is reinforced by the fact that the image of Offred is visually framing the story. Contrary to the novel ending with the male professor’s words, that image of June is the very first one on the cover and the title page, and also the last one on the last page.

Conclusion

For June-Offred, resisting within a totalitarian system is very difficult if not impossible since it could lead to execution. Atwood, in her introduction and interviews, explicitly explains how she uses both types of examples as bases for her writing. In her introduction to the 2019 edition of The Handmade, she refers directly to Nazism and indirectly, through a reference to 1984, to Stalinism (xvii). But what she also shows in her final “chapter,” “Historical Notes,” is that even in a democratic system, there are biases and constraints that prevent citizens from doing whatever they think is true or/and fair. As the historian’s dubious jokes show, the new democratic system is still patriarchal and limits women’s freedom.

Nault works within an editorial system shaped by the norms of a democratic Western country, which requires her to play the game and adhere to its rules even as she seeks to assert her own voice of freedom and resistance within it. From a critical point of view, certain aspects of the graphic novel’s production are still examples of a hierarchy in which comics remain subordinate to Literature. My emphasis is not on personal submission, that is, one person submitting to another. Such a focus would oversimplify the complexity of the reality, and in this case, it is not relevant: Atwood is too generous and smart to impose or suggest submission. Instead, I show how the submission to institutions and even more broadly to conventions and “ideological” systems such as the canon and the value of one type of “literature” (Literature) over another one (graphic novel) work. I also show that, by collaborating with the democratic institutions and finding original, specific ways of adapting, a creative artist can resist its questionable aspects and still has agency. 

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Footnotes

1. For issues of comics and legitimacy, see Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development, Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (2016), and Pascal Robert, ed., La Fabrique de la bande dessinée (2023), especially pp. 273–84.↺
2. See the dialogue where she talks about Witchling: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/4/2/renee-nault-interview/

   “RN: Absolutely, yeah. The thing with “Witchling” and other comics like that is that it can be anything I want. I’m not answering to anybody. If I decide I don’t want to draw this building, I don’t have to draw it. I can work around it. But of course working on someone else’s story, it’s very much set in stone. You’re definitely on a path if you’re working on somebody else’s work, whereas if you’re doing your own thing, you can go off in any direction your imagination takes you.

   THC: Are you currently working on anything else?

   RN: I am working on an anthology of short comics, trying out different styles. I also think I’m going to do a gallery show somewhere in the near future. And hopefully I’ll actually get to finish “Witchling,” because “Witchling” had a lot of fans that were really left hanging when I started “The Handmaid’s Tale.”↺

3. Except for some well-known didactic adaptations from the canon, and contrary to what one might think, there were proportionally few literary adaptions in the form of graphic novels until recently. But in the last decade, maybe showing a certain exhaustion of the creative graphic novel (Baetens “Literary Adaptations”), and because producers of comics (publishers and/or artists) became aware that there was an academic market for literary, “artsy”, more legitimate comics, these literary adaptations have become more common. Nault’s adaptation is certainly part of that literary trend.↺
4. There is a long bibliography on issues of adaptations, but some recent publications present good summaries and critical perspectives, such as The Routledge Companion to Adaptation edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (2018), especially the chapter, “Adaptation and the Concept of the Original”, by Rainer Emig (28-39). To show how the debate goes on, see Baetens (“Lire des adaptations” 5-26), and after for the specific field of comics.↺
5. The page numbers for the graphic novel are assigned by me, beginning with page 1 at the start of the first section (“Night”), since the published version is unpaginated.↺
6. An example of a misquote could be found on p. 49 of the novel: “All flesh is weak. All flesh is grass, I corrected her in my head”. By choosing weak instead of grass, authorities choose to eliminate the metaphor “grass” used several times in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah 40: 6–7) to replace it by a literal word “weak.”↺
7. The “found manuscript” as literary device has been used since at least Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès (1176) and Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1616) and many others after, see Herman, Jan, and Fernand Hallyn (1999).↺
8. For example, a written trace of resistance was found by Offred-June on the wall of the closet in “her” room. Interestingly enough, the words written on the wall are already questioning the issue of originality since “bastardes” (first occurrence: Atwood 58; Nault 47) is itself not original (it is not Latin) and means “not original” (“adjective: [of a thing] no longer in its pure or original form”, Oxford Languages, online).↺
9. Like the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the new rise of the Christian Fundamentalism in the U.S. influenced Atwood’s text (Atwood’s introduction 2019; Hutcheon, “Adapting [to] Atwood” 2021), one cannot avoid mentioning the strong influence of the other events, both political (mainly, the lasting impact of the 1973-Nixon White House tapes–especially on then-young left activists like Atwood) and the rapid and widespread of the new technology, especially magnetic tape cassette, now a period piece. Of course, one can speculate that Offred had access to such a technology (e.g., a Sony Walkman) during her stay in Waterforts’ house, or after, once she was freed, if she was.↺
10. For her polymathic work, already by 1984—see Kanadian Kultchur Komix featuring “Survivalwoman”, libretto like The Trumpets of Summer; television scripts like The Servant Girl, Snowbird, and Heaven on Earth; and even more after.↺
11. This “muting” is rendered violently explicit in an MGM-Hulu TV series scene, beyond Atwood’s text, where some handmaids in Washington DC have had their tongues cut out.↺
12. The name of this fictional historian, Pie-ix-oto has a quaint resemblance with the names of many popes (Pius I to Pie XII), a role in an institution that is a model of patriarchalism, therefore reinforcing other clues about his “scientific” discourse and furthering the skepticism that the reader should also have towards the “Historical Notes.”↺
13. The panopticon, first imagined by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham to be used as a model of easy and absolute surveillance for prisons, became a model for a disciplinary society as explained by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977, 195).↺
14. Also available as SparkNotes, presented in ‘Vintage classics’: https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-margaret-atwoods-the-handmaids-tale-75062; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vintage_Classics; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/17/classic-book-covers-sales-tv-adaptations↺
15. Although, to simplify, I will use the author’s name, I am not mainly interested in the author’s intention since it is difficult to prove (See Wimsatt’s “The Intentional Fallacy”), but also of limited interest within the more sociological perspective that is mine.↺
16. https://this.org/2017/11/08/margaret-atwood-reflects-on-the-significance-of-her-this-magazine-comic-strip/↺
17. Angel Catbird was created as a co-scriptwriter with illustrator Johnnie Christmas and War Bears with illustrator Ken Stacey, both published by comics publisher Dark Horse. War Bears is a her-story of the “Canadian Whites” (for more information, see the Introduction-s to the comics).↺
18. The design of the cover, especially in a bigger company, is given to a specialist, a graphic designer, closer to advertising and its commercial aspect. In this case, the cover art is by Nault but the cover design is by Jennifer Lum.↺
19. See her interview mentioning these limitations: https://rachellegardner.com/who-decides-titles-and-cover-design/.↺
20. The timing and modalities were different in each country, but the results are similar. In France, the law “protecting” children from “bad comics” was earlier (1949), and maybe consequently, the legitimization of bande dessinée was also a bit earlier.↺
21. A first victory for the legitimization of comics is Maus receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, but several more decades are going to be necessary to mainstream the idea that “comics”, often presented as ‘graphic novels” are as artful as novels or other arts (see Groensteen; Beaty).↺
22. “And yet, fervent rebellion has also been a part of the discourse on comics’ sociability, where comics studies is positioned as capable of carving out a place for itself within the academia by standing outside of or in-between art, literature, and film” (La Cour and Spanjers, “Ingratiation” p.[1]/online).↺
23. For a different but complementary view of Nault and resistance, see Commins.↺
24. Even if some pro-feminist interpretations (including Atwood in some interviews) emphasize that the last chapter “Historical Notes” also reveals, especially through Peixoto’s dubious sexist puns, that the system is still patriarchal.↺
25. “The adaptation did not work because Hollywood’s requirement for a feisty and successful heroine was at odds with Offred’s necessary passivity” (Macpherson 53).↺
26. Two examples of dislocation are: chapter 17 dislocated; Part XII, Chapter 32 = Part XI, Chapter 30, “Night,” dislocated in the graphic novel.↺
27. Big Brother is character and symbol of an all-viewing-knowing tool in G. Orwell’s novel, 1984, which is also a main reference in Atwood’s THT.↺
28. “I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.” (Atwood 120).↺
29. Many artists and writers created “documents” that became powerful testimonies later, such as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich(1962) and Charlotte Salomon’s paintings who like some other Jewish artists created art to document the extremely harsh realities of ghetto life, despite the risks of punishment.↺
30. For more about how artists can work within the cracks of the system in contemporary society, see Watkins Fisher, The Play in the System (2020).↺
31. There are 46 chapters in the novel but only 15 in the graphic novel. If we consider that the number 46 might be a reference to the number of characters on a classic QWERTY keyboard of a typewriter which is the basic iconic modern technology of a writer-novelist until computer technology, it is even less relevant in a graphic novel not connected to typewriters.↺
32. “This does not exclude the possibility that the novel may influence the authors, but this influence is then re-appropriated according to the narrative, semiotic and cultural constraints of the comics. In other words, the notion of chapter only proves fruitful to the extent that it frees itself (at least partially) from its literary roots” (Baroni and Goudmand 4; translation mine).↺
33. Atwood herself did it in an article in The New York Times entitled “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump” (10 Mar. 2017).↺
34. Although Pieixoto mentions that there are other sources similar to June’s testimony, the readers have access only to June’s, making hers the only resisting voice.↺
35. As an artist, Nault made some choices that might not be clear. For example, she accentuated the old age of the “Wife”, a negative character (from the “I”’s, and one can assume, the reader’s POV) but a “sister” nevertheless in feminist terms, and consequently, it might be more difficult to empathize with her, like it is possible to do in the TV series. Although Nault stated in interviews that she had not seen the TV series before finishing her graphic novel adaptation, she could neither totally ignore it nor the supremacy of the television media in contemporary culture (McMillan). Similarly, that anti-TV position might also have prevented Nault from accepting some positive changes in the TV series such as the presentation of some non-white characters like Moira, June-Offred’s friend, and Luke, her lover-partner before the Puritan revolution. This is surprising since Nault is Canadian and Canada has produced an official version of multiculturalism that seems to work quite well. This multiculturalism is absent in her graphic novel. It would have added an interesting political dimension to her use of resistance. series. Although Nault stated in interviews that she had not seen the TV series before finishing her graphic novel adaptation, she could neither totally ignore it nor the supremacy of the television media in contemporary culture (McMillan). Similarly, that anti-TV position might also have prevented Nault from accepting some positive changes in the TV series such as the presentation of some non-white characters like Moira, June-Offred’s friend, and Luke, her lover-partner before the Puritan revolution. This is surprising since Nault is Canadian and Canada has produced an official version of multiculturalism that seems to work quite well. This multiculturalism is absent in her graphic novel. It would have added an interesting political dimension to her use of resistance.↺
36. One can find another very recent example of this literary imperialism in the discussion of the comixscholars listserv about the Japanese literary author Osamu Dazai published as a manga (5 Dec. 2023); see also the publisher’s page with the tiny characters for the artist’s name: https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/osamu-dazais-the-setting-sun-9784805317617↺
37. See her interview in the Toronto Star where she says that in this case she eschewed “technology at almostevery stage” (Dundas), almost meaning that she did use it a bit.↺
38. See for example, Emily Facoory writing: “on the other hand, Atwood actively avoids classifying her work as sci-fi, instead referring to it as speculative fiction” (Online: thebookprize.com: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-the-handmaids-tale-by-margaret-atwood), 4 Apr. 2025.↺
39. Jewish artist Charlotte Solomon drew and painted her “life” during the second World War in Occupied France using both gouache and aquarelle/watercolour.↺
40. For a comparison emphasizing the differences between illustrating and drawing BD-comics, see Groensteen 2020.↺
41. Scott Bukatman argues that “comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins” (2016, 34). ↺
42. It is interesting to know that the first part of Matsumoto’s work (Tekkonkinkreet, Gogo Monsters) is also perceived by most critics as partly meta-comics and also that the Japanese full author is also seen as an artist that escaped the diktat of the publishing industry. See Fusanosuke, translated by Jon Holt and Fukuda Teppei, 2021.↺
43. Schiffrin; see also “In fact, buyouts, mergers, and other transfer financial arrangements occur so frequently that data become outdated rather quickly. …” (Lent et al. 5).↺
44. André Schiffrin, and Julien Lefort-Favreau, and Lefevre (“Gatekeeping”).↺
45. There are surveys, especially sponsored by big publishers or libraries, but data are not easy to interpret, especially because the genre “graphic novel” is a new and constantly evolving category.↺
46. For more about foreignization, see Venuti. I wrote a “minimum” because too much of it might produce a counterproductive effect: if too foreignized, less people will read the new version-graphic novel, which is both negative from the business perspective and the reputation of the author.↺
47. Hermans’s critical perspective is prolonged by postcolonial studies.↺