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I'm always bothered by the idea of posthumously going against an author's wishes but I've read the results of that a few times. In particular one of Thomas Hardy's novels was unpublished till after his death. He thought it wasn't good enough to be published and refused to and he left instructions that it not be published. I don't recall now which novel it was but I remember reading about that in the introduction when I read it a couple of decades ago. I had to ask myself if I really should read it. I decided to continue and as I recall, I enjoyed it.
So yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. I've decided not to read "Go Set a Watchman" partly because I don't want to spoil "To Kill a Mockingbird" in my mind and partly because Harper Lee didn't want it published. If I thought I'd really enjoy it for it's own sake I probably would read it.
My guess is I'll take a look at the graphic version of TKAM and decide then how I feel about buying it.
As an aside, when I was in college in Houston I drove a taxi to pay the bills and there are a lot of Mexican neighborhoods in Houston and I spent a lot of time working in them. Every store in those neighborhoods had graphic novels on racks and they seemed to be very popular. These were in Spanish and since I learned to read initially from reading comics and figuring out the words from the pictures I decided to learn a little Spanish by reading these, which I did.
Those graphic novels weren't like English graphic novels or comic books at all. The stories were pretty much the same kind of thing you'd see in TV shows of that era, 1960 to 1965. There were mysteries, soapish stories, westerns, love stories, melodramas, medical stories, etc. All were simple line art, often extremely nicely done, but never the sort of fancy artwork you see in comic books or graphic novels. Most were the size and thickness of paperbacks and contained 2 or 3 stories in a few hundred pages.
There weren't any superheroes or anything of that sort. They mostly weren't action stories. They were normal and realistic stories and often a lot of fun to peruse. I had a lot of fun with them. I even learned a bit of Spanish.
They convinced me that comics have real promise as an art form. I haven't read enough graphic novels to have any idea of that's been fulfilled. I have bought a couple but somehow I never get around to reading them.
I hope TKAM graphic novel is a good one. It's a good choice of story for a serious graphic novel. It might just start a trend.
Barry
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