Since this has now come up in my circles twice in the last month, let’s take a look at the beast that is the adaptation.

Ah, the graphic adaptation of a prior work. Anybody remember Classics Illustrated?

Now, I’m just going to be straightforward and say that I believe an adaptation belongs on the shelf with its source work. The reason for this is twofold: 1) It’s still the original author’s story, just tweaked and edited to fit the space allotted and 2) I’m still going to ultimately apply the Hierarchy to this, meaning, writer/author gets top billing.

The arguments are going to be something along the lines of, “But somebody else figured out the layout and made the art and yada yada…” Well, yes. And they will get the appropriate crediting in the record. But this is not a new idea being presented. This is a new form of someone else’s idea being presented. I also realize that the artist most likely created pictures based on how they saw the events in their heads, but (and I point again to the Hierarchy) those images were derived from someone else’s idea.

From a browsing perspective, I tend to think that someone interested in the graphic novelization of a previous work would probably be looking for it in the area where the original is found. This is not to say that someone just looking through the comic collection on your shelves wouldn’t get excited to find an adaptation of Jane Eyre over there near the Justice League, but I’m willing to bet the graphic novel of Jane Eyre is a welcome surprise to that student that waited until the last minute to do a book report and is currently browsing the Charlotte Brontë section.

To go a step further, I’ll argue that some authors already have a classification number for adaptations. Shakespeare has PR2878.A-Z for adaptations of his work by title. Why wouldn’t you put a graphic novel of Macbeth there? Doesn’t that make more sense than throwing it into a PN6727 or PN6728 (which is an argument in and of itself)? True, you could make section in the PN6727 that strictly houses Shakespeare graphic adaptations, but all the other stuff about Shakespeare is already together somewhere else. It seems silly to break them up.

There is a caveat. “What about movie versions? Why don’t we just shelve them with the originals as well?” There are several reasons why this is not the norm (which I’m not going to go into detail here), but the main one for this discussion is: how many movies have you seen where the movie doesn’t stray from the source material? With a graphic novel, the form allows for a direct translation of the source and has a target audience of people who read. Movies have time and budget limitations that usually end up causing the movie to differ from the book. Movies also tend to have way too many people involved causing too many opinions and most of the decisions being made based on something other than “is it in the book?” But graphic novels don’t have the constraints that hinder adaptation to film and I think you’ll find that most adaptations are done by creators that want to be true to the source as closely as possible. You are probably not going to find a graphic novel adaptation that significantly changes the characters, events, and endings (I’m looking at YOU, Jurassic Park).

This is not to say that a graphic novelization can’t go off the rails and be significantly different than the original, in which case, perhaps a judgement call needs to be made. But unless it is obvious and drastically different, I’m going to stand by my original opinion.

So, long story short, put the graphic adaptations with the originals.