The Road is perhaps Cormac McCarthy’s most successful work. Released in 2006, the book, which deviates from his usual Western inclinations, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Two years later, it became a Hollywood movie starring Viggo Mortensen and a young Kodi Smit-McPhee. Now, The Road is taking on a new form: the graphic novel.
French cartoonist Manu Larcenet brings McCarthy’s dark epic to life with detailed linework and stark black-and-white imagery. Larcenet’s drawings go beyond anything Hollywood could ever bring to the screen, showing the true sadness and depravity of The Road. The entire project was also approved by McCarthy himself, though the author died in June 2023 before he could see the final product.
“He died and only saw half of the album before we could communicate,” Larcenet tells Inverse. “I was only told that he was both happy and impressed by it, which is both too little and a lot.”
Ahead of his graphic novel’s U.S. release, Inverse interviewed Larcenet via email to find out how he discovered The Road, his thoughts on the story’s ambiguous ending, and the story behind some of his favorite images from the adaptation.
I started reading the road a few years back. I was really enjoying it, or at least appreciating it, it is a damn bleak book and “enjoying” feels like the wrong word to describe the experience.
Unfortunately for me, I started reading it immediately before covid lockdowns started hitting. That wasn’t an intentional choice, I’d had the book sitting around for a while and that just happened to be when it came up in my queue.
That was entirely too much. All of that bleak, post- apocalyptic resource scarcity in the novel was hitting way too close to home when I was struggling to find toilet paper and my local grocery stores were suddenly low on stock of nearly everything.
I’m normally not one to be hit too hard emotionally by a book, but this one got to me, so I really can’t recommend it enough even if I have yet to pick it back up to finish it.