Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road is a dark story, even compared to the author's own back catalogue of other bleakly brilliant books. It's also a masterpiece, one that rightly won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was quickly made into an equally uncompromising film by director John Hillcoat. Now it has provided the inspiration for a beautiful and haunting new graphic novel from French cartoonist Manu Larcenet which is published this week by Abrams ComicArts.
Set sometime after the end of the world, The Road follows two survivors – a father and his young son – as they scrape a desperate living amid the ash-coated ruins of a fallen civilization, all while fighting starvation and trying to avoid murderous strangers. As with McCarthy's novel, the plot is simple, the dialogue sparse, but Larcenet's book is dazzling in its depiction of both the harsh landscapes and the moments of heartbreaking humanity between its two main characters.
