DECEMBER 15, 2008
Baby got backward
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 GRAPHIC NOVEL |
Brad Pitt’s latest blockbuster is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who’s born old and ages back to infancy.
The movie comes out this Christmas. But this graphic novel is no less inventive than the film.
Fitzgerald started with the Civil War and ended up in the Jazz Age. The Pitt vehicle makes the story more contemporary (it starts in 1918 and ends in the 21st century). But the graphic novel retains the original time frame — as well as the story’s ties to Fitzgerald’s own, favorite era — and its carefully compressed text and beautifully detailed illustrations evoke that era perfectly. (Look online, and you’ll find illustrator Kevin Cornell’s sketches and interpretations; our favorite links Benjamin’s birth identification bracelet to the toe tags you’d fine in a morgue.) Needless to say, no adaptation can match the experience of reading the novella itself, but this one comes remarkably close.
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: A Graphic Novel (Quirk Books; hardcover; 128 pages)
Kevin Cornell’s website
