Kidnapped!

 

I could suggest any number of things that might persuade tough-minded, PC-gaming children to look into the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, but a quiet and traditionalist graphic adaptation of Kidnapped by Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy would be quite far down the list. Wasn’t Irvine Welsh up for a bit of buccaneering? Why not send rival classes into the highlands with flintlock pistols and tricorn hats? Or update the whole thing, only setting the story in a Portuguese hotel?

But Edinburgh is this year’s UNESCO City of Literature, and books will get squeezed into all sorts of bizarre educative shapes. A graphic novel it is - 25,000 children across the city have already received free gifts. Next year, Jekyll and Hyde will get the same treatment, although The Wasp Factory might have been more fun. Alan Grant, outspoken 2000AD legend though he may be (and historically important too, at least as an editor: he discovered Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and many others), is a self-confessed hack and will write what he is told, provided there is a cheque in the post. Besides giving Bruce Wayne a Scottish granny in the mid-nineties, this is his first opportunity to write about his homeland, if trimming Kidnapped to a dynamic synopsis can, in any real sense, be ‘about’ anything.

Grant described his and Kennedy’s mildly diverting graphic novel as “a last ditch attempt to get children to read” and joked about the tragic implications of a failure. It is a terrible thing to sneer, but a coy digression is not much better. Most attempts for literacy are better than none, but serving the graphic novel as a form is the way forward, I feel. Give the kids Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones if you want to save their souls. Don’t force antique novels into weird, asphyxiating spaces, however accurate the artwork. Quality and goodness is not a brand marker.