Drawing on a classic
Graphic illustrator Renee Nault was inspired by colour-coding in The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation
“I remember it well,” Anita Chong says about a summer afternoon in 2012 where the idea of a graphic-novel rendering of The Handmaid’s Tale was born.
Margaret Atwood, the book’s famous author, had invited Chong, along with another editor from McClelland and Stewart (the late Ellen Seligman) and art director Jennifer Lum over to her house: She wanted one of her books to get a graphic adaptation. But which one? They all agreed it had to be The Hand
maid’s Tale. “It is a narrative, frankly, which has only gained in significance and relevance,” says Chong, adding that the iconography, with the whole social order visualized by the colour people wore, made it a natural.
It had, at that point, “been a movie, a ballet, an opera.” So visual cred was there. But it had yet to be a television show — which is significant to the graphic novel’s creation story. The gang at M&S looked around for artists they thought could pull it off.
It was about this time that Vancouver-island based artist Renee Nault, now 38, enters the narrative. A few years earlier, Nault had illustrated for the Los Angeles Times a review of Atwood’s book The
“Nault brings a magnificent sorrow to her comics work.” STEPHEN HARRICK WRITER AT COMICSBEAT.COM
She had taken Sheridan College’s three-year illustration program and was now the creator of the Witchling comic, an illustrator, and a participant in TCAF (the Toronto Comic Arts Festival) where Lum had initially scouted her. Nault, along with a few others, were asked to submit audition packages.
“Right away I was very excited and of course I had read the book in high school. I was 100 per cent on board right from the get-go,” says Nault.
Keep in mind: this was before the TV series, and Nault made a point of not watching an earlier movie version.
As Nault points out, colours define roles in Gilead: red for the handmaids; blue for the wives; dull green for the Marthas, who serve as domestics. “It’s sort of a designer’s dream because everything is colour-coded already and you just sort of have to guide the viewer with the symbols that already exist,” she says.
That colour-coding gave her another way of signifying what was going on; so, when she created the scenes set in Gilead, she used only those colours. When she painted scenes flashing back to the time before, she used “the full spectrum of colours” evoking what we see every day. “We still have the audition package and it is jawdropping,” says Chong. “The attention to detail, the thoughtfulness about every aspect of it, whether the costuming or the sets or her interpretation of these Gileadean iconography was really quite breathtaking.”
Nault was hired. She first approached the adaptation as a movie script, “with character, dialogue and descriptions of the images that we would see.” That took a few months. Although the front cover of the book, out next Tuesday, reads “Art & Adaptation Renee Nault,” she didn’t actually write anything — it was more an editing process, she says, using the words Atwood had already written.
“I basically tried to figure out what are the core passages that make this book, that give it its personality, not just the events,” Nault says. “Offred’s internal monologue is so key to me … especially some of the wordplay. (It) really reminds me of Margaret because it’s so reserved but also very dry and witty and with this dark sense of humour.”
Making it seem almost autobiographical. Although, she says, she was “kind of nervous to ask something so personal” during their creative conversations. Atwood, in response to an email from the Star, wrote:
“I think that’s for others to say, but of course anything you write goes through your head in some way. A man once said to me at a reading, ‘ The HM Tale is autobiography.’ ‘No it isn’t,’ I said. “‘Yes it is,’ he said. “‘But it’s set in the future,’ I said. “‘You can’t get out of it that way,’ he said. “However, Agatha Christie wrote of many murders ... but did she commit any? The world would like to know.”
Nault, Atwood, editors and art directors collaborated, going back and forth about each drawing and the text each step of the way, ensuring Atwood ultimately ap- proved. One thing from the original book Nault wanted to ensure she kept was a vagueness about calendar years.
“When Margaret and I talked before I started the book about what time it would be set in … we tried to avoid really obvious time signifiers,” like technology, she said.
When she did draw computers, phones or cars, for example, Nault made them nondescript in an effort to transcend design trends or styles.
Strikingly, she painted each one of the pages by hand — in watercolour, eschewing technology at almost every stage. “There’s this tactile quality and there’s the quality of accident that the computer can never duplicate,” says Nault. “Especially with watercolour, the paint behaves how it wants to behave. A blob or halo will just sort of appear and you work with that. And I think that becomes some of the best parts of the art.”
(Although, in the final stages, it was corrected if a blob of paint landed, for example, on a character’s face.)
It’s not watercolour in the wispy, transparent way you’re used to seeing it.
“There’s a really underused method where if you use them straight out of the tube, like pure pigment, they’re incredibly vivid and they have an amazing spontaneous quality,” says Nault. “They do whatever they want on the page and you have to work with them instead of controlling them.”
It’s a rich, visceral approach to telling the story, which Nault first came across when she read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school.
She says she has gone back to it many times over the years. “Reading it again, every time you read it there’s something new you pick up on and oh, that’s so relevant to right now.”
And then, disaster struck. She injured her wrist “in a fall” that slowed the drawing process right down, from at least eight hours a day to two. Sometimes, though, disaster has its positive points.
During the seven years it took to create the book — stretched out because of Nault’s wrist injury — the timing became even better. Its popularity exploded internationally: its dystopian slant echoes many of the issues facing a Don- ald Trump America — eroding women’s rights, the rise of religious fundamentalism; the television adaptation is now in its second season; the iconography of the red bonnet has become a symbol of oppression and is used by protesters around the world.
In a piece about Nault at comicsbeat.com, Stephen Harrick said “Nault brings a magnificent sorrow to her comics work.”
It’s a lovely description and Nault, who says depression is a factor in her life, wants to show “that sadness is OK and that it’s something that passes.” It’s a tension that provides hopefulness as well as acknowledging that the world is not a perfect place — a sensibility that works well with The Handmaid’s Tale.
As with the original this book ends, too, with Offred stepping into a van — and, in the final pages, with a council looking back on the history of Gilead. It’s not the final word on Offred’s fate; Atwood’s sequel The Testaments, to be released in September, will take the story further, picking up where the original left off and becoming yet another work — after the series, the opera, the play and Nault’s creation — drawing inspiration from the original novel.