Nicki’s writing

Interviewer: How did you go about the graphic adaptation of 'The Great Gatsby'?

Nicki Greenberg: It was a long process and it was done in stages. The first stage was making detailed notes on the text. Thinking about it a lot, analysing it a lot, I did a lot of visual research so looking up books showing photographs of New York of the time, of the buildings, the interiors, the cars. I'd never actually drawn a car before embarking on this book. Then I spent quite a long time doing roughs, planning. There was character development: planning out the characters which are, of course, not human. They're these strange creatures, so getting the characters just right then working on the roughs. Then there was the process of doing the final work and working out the layouts of the pages because the layouts themselves provide a certain atmosphere and quite a bit of information. So it was a very long process. All of those pictures are hand drawn with a steel nib and ink before being scanned into the computer and the sepia colour put in. So very labour intensive, long work.

Interviewer: How did you approach the balance of dialogue and visual representation in your work?

Nicki: That was by far the hardest part of doing this adaptation because I didn't want it to be a straight illustration of the work. That everything was said was simply shown in a corresponding picture. The words in the pictures had to play off each other and I had to decide which of Fitzgerald's wonderful pieces of luminous prose I was going to repeat in there using the words and which ones I was going to suggest through the images. And then of course, when they would play off against each other, when the words would say one thing and the images would suggest something different. It was a constant process of analysing the text, going back to the original text and just thinking about it very hard through the adaptation. That was the hardest part. That's harder than drawing 1500 pictures.

Interviewer: What do you want your readers to get out of this adaptation?

Nicki: I want them to enjoy it of course. I guess I wanted to bring them into Fitzgerald's world from a funny angle, from an interesting angle. I do hope that it inspires people to read the original novel if they haven't already and if they have perhaps to think about it in a new light.