The Red Prophet Picture Book

Orson Scott Card is best known for his novel Ender's Game, which is fair enough. I like it a lot myself.

But my favorite Card novel is Red Prophet, the second novel in his "Alvin Maker" series about a fantasy frontier America where folk magic works.

Alvin is the seventh son of a seventh son, and this mystical conjugation makes him a Merlin-like figure of magical destiny. The first novel dealt with all this; and it was certainly interesting. But Red Prophet goes into the broader world, where ambitious White men plot among and against each other, and Red Indians are slowly dying of rampant alcohol addiction.

Two brothers seek to change this: Tenskwa-Tawa, the Red Prophet of the title, who wants to segregate Red men from White men and pursue his vision of a great Crystal City; and Ta-Kumsaw, the great military leader, who simply wants to drive the White men from North America entirely.


If Ender's Game is a story about how institutions (especially the military) use and exploit people for their own purposes, Red Prophet is about religion and social reform. That is probably part of why I like it better; it's a theme that's closer to my heart.

So I was quite taken to find that there's a graphic novel version of Red Prophet. I bought the first volume and eagerly consumed it.

In retrospect, I could have guessed that there would be problems.

Card has a very strong narrative voice in this book. It's not just happening, as many novels try to suggest, with you as an observer; someone is telling you this story. (If I remember correctly, the series actually confirms this at some point; the narrator is Taleswapper.)

This doesn't translate at all well into comics format, where the ideal is to show things visually. Visually presenting the events of the book loses almost all of the appealing style.

And so they don't. Instead, they cram as much text as they possibly can into text boxes. Virtually every panel in every page is loaded with a few sentences from the novel. The effect is to make it a sort of Red Prophet Picture Book- an unhappy compromise that loses the advantages of both novel and graphic novel formats.

Some novels don't make good comic books. That isn't a sign that anything is wrong with them; it just means that the novel format has its own specific advantages, which other media don't share. Foremost among these advantages is the ability to get inside someone's head- to share their thoughts and feelings.

Card is good at this. Comics aren't. It's a sad way to realize the fact; but at least I've learned something from the Red Prophet graphic novel, after all.