Animorphs Revisited - The Graphic Novels

This is an addition to my 2021 Animorphs ​retrospective - check out Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

If you knew me in 2021 then there is a very good chance you were subjected to a lot of Animorphs talk. If so, then you have Chris Grine to blame.
 
To explain – early that year, during a break in lockdowns, I went down to St Kilda (where I now live), and while browsing the local bookstore I saw Grine’s graphic novel adaptation of The Invasion, the first Animorphs book by Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant. I had loved Animorphs as a kid in the 90s, but never finished the series and or revisited it. But I’d remained nostalgic for it and so I bought the graphic novel. That afternoon I went to a cocktail bar overlooking Luna Park and read it cover to cover.
 
Immediately, I was reminded of everything I’d loved about the series as a kid. The vivid characters, the fascinating lore, the tragic aliens. By the time I got home I’d resolved to buy and re-read the entire series. It was lockdown. We all had our things.
 
My mission proved easier said than done though. Animorphs has been largely out of print since the early 2000s. In fact, the graphic novel adaptations were intended as a way to reboot the series for new readers without having to republish 62 often dated and disposable Scholastic paperbacks. But those paperbacks were my childhood, man. I wanted them all. And with full sets going for a couple of thousand dollars online, I took to scouring second hand bookstores and buying bulk boxes of old kids’ books until I finally got the set. And as I wrote about extensively at the time, the re-read stunned me. The books were dark and tragic and beautiful and wrenching and far better than I remembered. Sometimes they were also stupid and obviously ghostwritten. But by the end, not only was I an evangelical Animorphs convert, I discovered many others were too. And now, the graphic novels were giving the series a new lease on life. Every year, I looked forward to the new one coming out. I’d buy it, go back to that same bar, and enjoy getting to revisit the world and characters in a new medium.
 
But recently it’s become clear that Grine’s adaptations will almost certainly end with the just-released sixth. The reason for this is unclear, but Grine and Applegate have both said online that Scholastic are yet to commission more. Given the time it takes to make a graphic novel, and the fact that kids move on fast, its hard to imagine they’ll continue if they haven't made the call already. Which not only leaves the adaptation unfinished, but potentially marks the end of Animorphs overall.

So, given the lengthy blog posts I wrote about the books in 2021, it felt unfair not to do the same for the graphic novels.
 
These adaptations are quietly fascinating for a few reasons. Among the fanbase they’ve proved a little divisive even if the overall feeling seems to be of goodwill. To me, they’re ultimately a noble failure that illustrates exactly why Animorphs has been so hard to revive.
 
For the unfamiliar, the six graphic novels are essentially what they sound like – direct adaptations of the first six Animorphs books. They tweak or remove a few 90s pop culture references and make some judicious storytelling choices to visually realise the often internalised narratives of the first-person books, but if you’re a hardcore fan they’re basically as faithful a retelling as you could ask for.
 
And that, maybe, is the problem.
 
Chris Grine was always adamant that he intended to remain true to Animorphs as fans remembered it, and he did. But this begged a question that there never seemed to be a solid answer for – how the hell did he or Scholastic intend to adapt the whole series? There are fifty-four mainline books plus eight spin-off or prequel novels that are so beloved that to not include them would be outrageous. And despite some attempts to speed up the process, Grine tended to average one volume a year. Given the work involved, it’s hard to argue that anyone should have expected a faster pace, but a book a year meant that finishing the series would take about six decades.
 
In its 90s heyday Animorphs books, like other Scholastic titles, came out almost monthly. This was made possible by extensive ghostwriters working to outlines provided by Applegate and Grant – essentially the TV showrunner model, used in books. But Grine had always made it clear that he didn’t want to work with another artist or share the job, which was of course his prerogative. Even if he had collaborated or delegated, its hard to imagine you’d get more than two or three books a year, which still makes it a two-decade project.
 
Of course, not every Animorphs book was essential. You can get a pretty complete experience by reading roughly half of them. But, as online debate over my own reading guide has illustrated, this creates a new issue because who gets to decide what’s essential? Yeah, we can all probably agree that the one where Cassie gets stranded in the Australian outback isn’t all that important, but there are plenty of books that don’t move the plot forward yet are worth reading for their character development or worldbuilding or themes. Combining storylines also poses problems because Animorphs is very episodic. There’s an overall narrative but the series is structured more like a TV show than anything else; ‘mythology’ episodes interspersed with fun side quests and standalone ‘morph of the week’ diversions. And the truth is that some of the early books, including some adapted by Grine, are pretty repetitive. This isn't so much an issue when the next installment is just weeks away, but a year becomes a long time to wait for something that doesn’t feel especially vital.
 
There’s an argument that Grine could have been a bit bolder with his adaptation, working towards a retelling of the story that could be done in ten volumes or something more realistic, but I’m not sure that would have worked either. Animorphs fans can be intense and they’re also your only guaranteed buyers. Deviating from Applegate and Grant’s storytelling in ways fans disagreed with would be a risk likely not worth taking.  
 
But without either a clear plan for how to ensure the series could be adapted in its entirety or more overt willingness to make changes, the Animorphs graphic novels were never realistically going to reach their conclusion. And this is the problem any future attempts to revive the franchise will face. It’s not practical to rerelease the entire series in physical form, as a failed 2011 attempt to do just that proved. Releasing ‘combined’ or abridged volumes provides its own issues, as touched on above. And so, as a fantastic Paris Review retrospective says, Animorphs remains a ‘cult religion that will never gain another convert’.
 
If we can concede that the graphic novels didn’t revive Animorphs in the popular consciousness, then what’s left is to consider them on their own terms, in how they succeed as adaptations. The answer to that is mixed.
 
Online there has been some criticism of Chris Grine’s art style – not in terms of its quality, but its suitability for Animorphs. I can’t stress this enough for those who haven’t read the series; Animorphs is dark. Really dark. It’s violent and bleak and depressing. By the final book each of our teenage protagonists has killed many, many people. There are multiple acts of genocide and harrowing descriptions of how it feels to see your body being taken over by a malevolent entity that makes you a mute observer to your own subjugation. The reason these books have branded themselves on the brains of so many despite not being readily available for years is because they dared to go places that no other children’s series did. Harry Potter ended with our central heroes marrying their childhood sweethearts and living happily ever after. Animorphs ended with them being accused of war crimes at the Hague before signing up for a suicide mission because none of them could cope with peacetime.
 
Do you see now what the issue with a visual adaptation might be, regardless of the artist’s style? I once wondered if my own Andromache books are too dark for kids, until a bookseller pointed out that young readers take on board what they understand and leave the rest. It’s a lot harder to get away with that in a visual medium. Now granted, Grine never got to any of the really heavy stuff, but he still had to depict severed limbs and one character’s suicide attempt and another character in dolphin morph being bitten nearly in half. To Grine’s perpetual credit, he didn’t shy away from any of this. But his soft, kid-friendly illustration style didn’t always naturally fit with the heavier material.
 
But that’s the thing – Animorphs is for kids. Scholastic were never going to get Frank Miller to illustrate this thing. And while older fans might grumble about Grine not capturing the depths of darkness they adore about the series, he committed to what he could and did it in a style that wouldn’t have parents refusing to buy the book for their eight year old. 
 
Some of his books were better than others – and funnily enough, his best were the ones that posed the biggest challenges to any kind of visual adaptation; The Encounter, which largely details Tobias’ psychological torment over being permanently trapped in the body of a red tailed hawk, and The Capture, in which Jake is taken over by a Yeerk and held captive in his own mind. In both, Grine found clever, compelling ways to dramatize internal conflict. It’s cases like this that underline what a shame it is that we won’t get to see more of what he can do when the books get increasingly weird and heavy.

Was Grine the perfect fit? It’s a pointless question. He’s the guy who wanted to do it and wanted to do it in a way that was true to what Animorphs was. The more you think about this endeavour, the more you realise how deceptively difficult it is. 
 
But Animorphs has endured this long despite those barriers to revivals or reaching new audiences. If anything, its fandom has only grown and it’s possible that is thanks to Grine. I’m a prime example – to return to the cult religion analogy, I’m a lapsed member brought back into the fold explicitly by his work. So personally I’ll always be grateful for what we got and hopeful that one day we get more.

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