Cormac McCarthy’s Walking Dead
The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation adapted by Manu Larcenet from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road (Abrams ComicArts, 2024)
Reviewed by Brody Eldridge
Plumes of smoke and clouds spew forth in black and white, etched with hundreds of fluid, curving lines and splotched with specks of ash. The apocalyptic opening panels continue in black and white, introducing the father and son protagonist duo, and transition to dull and faded colors which stick for the rest of Manu Larcenet's 2024 graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006).
This is not the first visual adaptation of McCarthy's work. No Country for Old Men (2005) was originally a screenplay. It then turned novel then turned movie, Oscar-winning. McCarthy wrote multiple screenplays and two plays. The Road already received the silver screen treatment in 2009, which raises the question: what purpose does a graphic novel adaptation serve?
Included at the end of this edition is "A Plea for The Road," a letter Larcenet sent to McCarthy, asking for permission to adapt the novel. Larcenet's intent is "not to rewrite anything," "but to draw [McCarthy's] words." For Larcenet, "the magical part of being an illustrator is to find a silent line to draw with every word. These lines could support [McCarthy's] without distorting them" (163). Larcenet succeeds in assisting the text through adaptation with visual art.
The Road is about a father and son in a postapocalyptic world of ash and destruction (the cause of the crisis is never explained). The story follows them as they walk through a decaying United States, south down the road, to avoid a harsh winter in the north. Society has collapsed, and most people have turned to nefarious means to survive, although no one knows why they even want to survive.
Larcenet's pen does not shy away from drawing the vicious conditions and numerous victims of this indeterminate crisis. Perhaps three key moments that dutifully reveal the will to survive in face of the destruction are the basement, the shelter, and the thief.
During their wandering down the road, the father and son stumble upon a dilapidated farm shed, with a cellar door barred by a new padlock. Looking for food, the father breaks the lock, and the duo descend into the basement. The shock of finding, hidden underground, the victims of cannibalism (a practice that most of humanity is now utilizing to survive) is mostly left to readers’ imagination in McCarthy's original work. However, through Larcenet’s pen, it is shown in its brutality. Despite cries for help from the mob, the father and son flee to avoid becoming victims themselves. Larcenet masterfully utilizes color in this scene: outside is pure snow and white, which shifts to a dull grey once the duo enters the shed (87-89). The basement is depicted in a dull copper (as if they descended into hell itself), and the colors transition back out the same way once the father and son flee (90-93).
McCarthy's dualism offers reprieve in the doomsday shelter, which juxtaposes with the basement scene. After fleeing the basement, the father and son find another locked cellar door and decide to take the risk to break into it. Instead of finding hell, this time they find paradise. Larcenet again uses colors well, with a faint sepia red flaring up as they initially break into the doomsday shelter (102-103). This sepia red evokes the possibility of a hellish discovery, like the prior basement, but the color relieves itself to a calm blue once they descend into the shelter to find shelves of soda, ramen, canned goods, books, running water, and working electric lights (104-111). Most striking about Larcenet's version of the shelter is how he depicts the son's prayer. While the son thanks the people who left the shelter's food behind, Larcenet cross edits, displaying destroyed apartment complexes and bodies hanging from a construction crane behind the text of the prayer. The son's hope that the people "are safe in heaven... ...with God" holds more weight against these images (109).
A key talisman of the father and son is their cart, which they push down the road. Towards the end of the novel, while camped out by the sea, they awake to find the cart stolen. Chasing down the thief's tracks, they find the man who took it. The father, in a cruel manner, has the thief strip at gunpoint and leaves the thief for dead. While McCarthy is not explicit in his depiction of the thief’s size, Larcenet depicts the thief as frail and thin, a shell of a man. Larcenet utilizes this lack of description in the original to make the cruelty of the father in the visual scene seem that much crueler (143-148).
There are advantages and disadvantages to visually adapting McCarthy's novel. In some ways, McCarthy's criticism of capitalism is lost through this adaptation. Larcenet, most likely to avoid copyright violations, opts to depict things like what are initially cans of Coca-Cola, as a generic-looking 50s soda brand. What the graphic novel lacks, however, is made up for by this exact decision to use bright and cheery 50s styled branding. It clashes against the harsh environment the father and son find themselves in, and capitalist marketing like "BEACH BODY READY?" means nothing when, a few pages later during a swim, the father and son are depicted naked, visible as nothing but skin and bone (33, 41). They look like walking dead, with rib cages flaring, eyes dark and hollow, and shaped like skeletons.
These sharp visuals, both in the book and graphic novel, have a weight, a moral responsibility. The father refers to this responsibility when he tells the son "that the things you put into your head are there forever" (29). Now former-McCarthy scholar, Aaron Gwynn expounds upon this moral responsibility specifically regarding Blood Meridian, where he writes about Gérard Genette's conception of the "focalizer." Gwynn explains, "a Narrator speaks, a Focalizer sees." The Kid in Blood Meridian is a focalizer, a witness, and "complicit in the war crimes of Glanton’s Gang, not participating in them, but not turning away from them either." Gwynn states that the Kid functions "as a kind of surrogate Reader," a "proxy in this blood-drenched world." The reader "who makes it to the final page is himself judged," just like the Kid.
Unlike in Blood Meridian, where the Kid chooses to look and is judged for it, the father and son in The Road are not only forced to look at the horrors–the horrors are their circumstances. If there is a focalizer in novelization of The Road, it is probably the father, whose point of view takes precedent. Focalization, an apt photographical term, requires a move by the author to focalize the narrative through a character’s eyes, to focus the lens so to speak. In the graphic novel, there is only the narrator. In this case, Larcenet, and Larcenet's visual narrative does not focus in on a specific character. the reader is also a viewer, but are we judged for witnessing the father and son's struggle?
The emphasis of The Road's narrative is not the horrors (unlike Blood Meridian), but on perseverance despite them. Gothic literature scholar Devendra Varma, in his book The Gothic Flame (1966), describes the difference between terror and horror. The difference is "between the smell of death" (terror) and "stumbling against a corpse" (horror). Here, the father and son do not want to witness the horrors, and this creates a stench of terror for both the duo and the reader. This shared feeling of terror reveals the motivations of "seeing." This feeling is an admission that the reader is reading for perhaps the right reasons (not to purposely witness the violence), absolving the reader.
The Road is a metaphor and an allegory. The son represents hope; he believes the best in those he meets. He cries for the thief when the father leaves the thief for dead. He always asks his father if there are other good people out there on the road. He implores his father to be generous to an old man they encounter. The depth and distinction of a graphic novel adaptation of The Road means that the reader visually witnesses exactly what the father and son do, and when the father and son persevere, with these "things in their head" so to speak, the reader perseveres, too. In some ways, it might mean more to the reader of the graphic novel (as opposed to the book) when the son is optimistic despite the horrors witnessed because the reader has literally seen them, too.
Some things, though, are truly lost in translation. This adaptation does not contain all the words of the original text. McCarthy's theme of "carrying the light" is dropped, and instead Larcenet chooses to distill it to the father and son's mantra that they are the "good guys" (which is copied from the original text). Plot points, like the mother, are shortened and retooled, and other points, like the dreams and the brook trout, are dropped. Perhaps there is an argument that it would be hard to differentiate between dream and reality in the graphic novel. Regardless of reasoning, Larcenet makes do with the plot beats he does include, and he focuses in on the metaphor of the road.
The road is the one constant for the survivors. The father tells the son early on, "we'll get to the end of the road, you'll see" (84). Literally, they are following the road to its end, but it is the path that everyone, good and bad, seemingly follows in this apocalypse. It is all the father and son have outside of each other. When they reach the end of the road and find the ocean, they just continue, following another road. The father, however, passes from sickness and weariness, and the son is left to keep following the road on his own. McCarthy utilizes this powerful metaphor to demonstrate how love can propel one forward in bleak, hopeless times. The father and son keep walking, keep living, despite the circumstances humanity faces and despite the lack of hope for civilization to be rebuilt proper.
At one point, the son is sick, and the father echoes a promise he made to his son earlier in the novel, "I will not send you into the darkness alone" (141). Towards the end, when the father passes and the son keeps going alone, the son encounters a man. Beautifully, Larcenet depicts this in full white. The unseen, implicit darkness of the situation is corrected by the light and goodness of the encounter, where the man, who has a family, invites the son to join him. The son, a true optimist, finds safe companionship. It seems hope is not lost.
Manu Larcenet's adaptation is a great companion piece to the novel, and timely. Even in 2024, McCarthy's story is more poignant than ever. Generation Z is coming into adulthood, and we (I speak as a member of Gen Z) are now picking up the responsibility we have in shaping this world. We are entering difficult times, bleak times. Geopolitical instability, a climate crisis, economic disparity, and a host of problems associated with social media and the internet: McCarthy's metaphor of the road is perhaps the most relevant it has ever been. Despite the dim circumstances of the novel, and our world, there is hope. That hope is tangible in the text, despite what we now know about McCarthy’s personal life.
McCarthy's archives will open fall 2025 at Texas State University. This is the outset of a postmortem of McCarthy's oeuvre. McCarthy's actions are reprehensible, and his works profound. Somewhere in the middle those two truths meet, and that is the place for a discussion that will continue in the coming years. In the meantime, we have his published work and the work it continues to inspire. Larcenet's graphic novel adaptation of The Road lays bare the profundity at the core of McCarthy's story. A quote of McCarthy's, which appears in the Vanity Fair article, sums up The Road's ethos well: "The world’s a dark place, and there’s a cold wind blowing. So you’ve got to turn up your collar and walk on.”
Brody Eldridge graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a BA in English. He is a 2024-2025 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award winner for the country of Georgia.
