ABSTRACT
When Marvel started its series of graphic novels based on the classics, award-winning Regency-era novelist Nancy Butler[HSM3] approached Marvel’s editor with the idea of creating a graphic novel that might be attractive to female readers. Butler partnered with superhero comics illustrator Hugo Petrus, and in 2010, their adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was released as a graphic novel. Since that time, Butler has written three additional Jane Austen novels—Sense and Sensibility with Petrus, Emma with illustrator Janet K. Lee, and Northanger Abbey with Lee and Nick Filardi. Using Linda Hutcheon’s framework for adaptation, this chapter examines how audiences of Jane Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and Nancy Butler’s graphic novel adaptations of those novels construct an interpretive field created when they encounter these texts one after the otherThe chapter concludes by suggesting that combining Hutcheon’s ideas about adaptation with a performance-oriented approach—with its focus on audience, interaction, and narrative strategies—create new avenues and possibilities for the graphic narrative.
