Odd Thought:

I was surfing randomly and came across this.

I hadn't even realized that the story is public domain now, but it was one of my favorites when I was little.

It's the imagery, really. I'm not prone to visual appreciation, art and imagery have to be really striking or really bad to truly register past the story for me. But A Little Princess always captured me.

Everything was so vivid, I thought it needed to be seen. Unfortunately, the movie adaptations are uniformly bad. Well, the Shirley Temple version is preferable, but the ending very sugar-coated and simplified. And I'd prefer not to talk about the monstrosity that was the Cuaron version.

But...it would be an absolutely lovely graphic novel. All the textures, the luxury, the clothes and vivid characters... It could be breath-taking.

Even the structure, heavy image emphasis over the use of dialogue, really would work in a comic form. Even as I read it now, I can see how to adapt it into a comic script. With a good artist, it could work incredibly well.

It's funny, we see comic book adaptations of the Baby-Sitters Club and some movies, but I've never heard of anyone taking public domain classics and making adaptations of them. But it seems like there'd be some amazing possibilities to explore there.

I mean Burnett's an obvious choice. The Secret Garden and A Little Princess would make for beautiful comics.

Conan-Doyle? Sherlock Holmes as a comic has got to have been done. But still, it'd be amazing. Jules Verne? Sure, we have "League of Extraordinary Gentleman" but has anyone adapted his actual work?

Robert Louis Stevenson? Louisa May Alcott? Mark Twain?

I'm not sure how well they'd sell, but it seems like they'd be a good way to introduce kids to the classics. Better than those dumb yellow Cliff-Notes books at any rate. Or those dumb old Classics Illustrated. They're so static. The art, I mean. They make the stories a chore. The art should be like the stories themselves, moving and flowing.

Like comic books!