Bryony Adams is destined to be murdered. But fortunately fate has terrible marksmanship. In order to survive she must run as far and as fast as she can. After arriving in Seattle, Bryony befriends a tortured musician, a market fish-thrower, and a starry-eyed hero who is secretly a serial killer bent on fulfilling Bryony’s dark destiny.

Comic book artist and illustrator Orion Zangara gives new life to Mercedes M. Yardley’s lyrical fairy tale with a high body count. Experience Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Graphic Novel of Murder and Whimsy in a completely different way as story telling and art intertwine.

Run, Star Girl.

Book post – the best kind of post

Just the other day, I was lucky enough to get a copy of Volume one of the graphic novelisation of Mercedes M Yardley’s tale of whimsy and murder, posted to me by the author herself.

It’s the second time that I’ve read a graphic novel version of a story I’d previously read in a traditional book format. (The other one was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire). As with Larsson’s thriller it is interesting to see how the different format affects the experience of the story.

In this technological era, there are so many varying forms through which to enjoy and appreciate humanity’s great impulse as story tellers. The growth in Film Studies courses effectively acknowledges the literary element to the cinematic choices of directors and actors. At the same time so many readers enjoy stories as audio books – the experience mediated (and inevitably altered) by the talents of the narrator. Games are another story-telling medium which – through the dignity and rigour of academic study – is accepted as being – like all art forms – a shaper, creator and reflector of human experiences. That point was emphasised for me when I discovered that the chair of Glasgow World Con – Esther MacCallum-Stewart – was also Professor of Game Studies at Staffordshire University.

As writers (and teachers of writing) we are often told to excite our readers’ imaginations by appealing to their senses with strong concrete images of sights, scents, tastes, textures and sounds. The graphic novel necessarily front loads the visual imagery but the cliché that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is only a cliché because it’s true. You have just to remember how much information is delivered in a single pithy tableau that is seen for barely a second on the cinema screen, information that would have taken an author pages of text to evoke the same detail of character and context.

the cliché that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is only a cliché because it’s true.

With all that in mind I was curious to see how the inherently tragic story of Bryony Adams had changed in the process of graphic novelisation.

As with The Girl Who Played with Fire, the story has to be abridged to fit the graphic format, and hard choices made to pare Yardley’s elegant prose down to the bare essentials of story telling without losing that lyrical whimsy. There are still star bursts of prose to adorn Orion Zangara’s excellent artwork.

The central element of the story is that Bryony Adams is doomed to die prematurely at the hands of a murderer – a fate everyone knows, none can prevent and yet even fickle misfiring fate cannot predict with any precision.

You drag the mantle of certain destruction behind you like a ragged blanket. You wear it with such grace.

Double page spread extract from Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Graphic Novel of Murder and Whimsy Volume One

I liked how Zangara used Bryony’s flowing hair to frame elements in a montage of fate’s near misses where someone other than Bryony got caught in the way of a violent end.

Bryony’s life becomes one of constant flight. As cack-handed fate struggles to hit a moving target, With friends, acquaintances and lovers falling victim to misfortune’s blunderbuss, Bryony strives to avoid any close attachments. The risk of friends becoming simply collateral damage, unlucky bystanders in one of fate’s near misses, is too much to bear. That is until she comes to Seattle and finds her wanderlust fades overwhelmed by connections to a found family around Seattle’s fish market.

Zangara’s evocative imagery triggered a connection I hadn’t made before. Some years after I had first read Pretty Little Dead Girls, my eldest daughter and her wife moved to Olympia just outside Seattle and when we visited them this year we went on a tour of the famous fish market where Bryony worked, and even saw the iconic monument which I can’t stop myself calling The Space Spike even though I have a T-shirt with it on. When the Seattle 2025 Worldcon team came to present their vision at the closing ceremony of Glasgow Worldcon 2024, they even brought some stuffed fish to throw. So I feel that fate is teasing me even as it torments Bryony.

As Bryony’s imperative shifts from flight to fight, one fears for those around her even as you delight in the opportunity for love that she finds in the depths of adversity. But throughout this first volume, the story captures both the fragile joy of Bryony’s determined life and the looming certainty of fate’s plans for her.

However, despite the careful abridgment, and the short but sweet nature of the source novel, a single volume of the graphic novel cannot tell the whole of Bryony’s story. For those who know the story already, Zangara has presented an interesting perspective that throws new light on favourite lines and settings. Hopefully, there will be time and opportunity to bring the rest of Bryony’s fascinating and surprisingly joyful tragedy to this new format and a fresh readership.

See More of Orion Zangara’s art work here, or read more of T.O.Munro’s reviews of Pretty Little Dead Girls here, here, and (my very first review back in 2014) here

Find out more about Pretty Little Dead Girls Vol. 1 on Mercedes M Yardley’s website.

Orion Zangara’s Cover for Pretty Little Dead Girls (Source Orionzangara.com)