These sequences enhance the heartfelt parts of the book, without making it too upsetting or dramatic. In lesser hands, this adaptation may have felt limited by its commitment to the source material, but Bagieu uses the larger page count to wring as much possible tension from each scene - whenever our young, unnamed protagonist encounters a witch, she slows down the pacing to a degree that will feel excruciating and agonizing for young readers, as if they really are trapped with a child-hating monster.īagieu also uses the decompressed storytelling to make the relationship between the boy and his grandmother more poignant: she invents a few (often wordless) scenes to emphasize the recent death of the boy’s parents (particularly early on), and there’s the particularly striking use of a whole page-sized panel to show how shocking and devastating it is when she discovers her boy has been turned into a mouse. If you’ve read The Witches, you may or may not be pleased to know that Bagieu’s version is quite faithful to the book, hewing closely to its story and structure, and acting as more of an illustration of every sentence than an expansion or extrapolation. Graphic-novel readers and Roald Dahl fans alike will relish this dynamic new take on a uniquely funny tale. This full-color graphic-novel edition of Roald Dahl’s The Witches is the first-ever Dahl story to appear in this format.

When an eight-year-old boy and his grandmother come face-to-face with the Grand High Witch herself, they may be the only people who can stop the witches’ latest plot to stamp out every last child in the country. They live in ordinary towns all across the world - and there’s nothing they despise more than children. Most people don’t know that witches wear ordinary clothes and have ordinary jobs.

The witches the graphic novel