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Adapting books into other media can be a tricky business. Debates about whether a book or its movie adaptation are better have existed for decades. I’ve even written a few pieces comparing graphic novels to the original books. But what do the creators of these books think about the process of adaptation? I was able to interview Jewell Parker Rhodes, author of the novel Ghost Boys and its graphic adaptation (also called Ghost Boys), about this very subject.
Illustrated by Setor Fiadzigbey, Ghost Boys is the haunting story of Jerome, a young Black boy gunned down by a white police officer. Jerome’s spirit remains earthbound, watching helplessly as his family struggles to cope with his death. Eventually, he connects with the ghosts of other murdered boys — and with the living daughter of the man who killed him.
The original novel was published in 2019, and the adaptation was released earlier this month. While Rhodes “tr[ies] to write visually with sensory details,” making a prose-only story suitable for a comic-reading audience still required a great deal of effort. Rhodes credits the work of Fiadzigbey — “Setor is a genius. His art is incredibly detailed and he makes me feel I’m inside my novel’s world.” — and editor Andrea Colvin, who “knew my sentences were constructed to evoke the African American oral tradition as well as written with a restraint that didn’t sensationalize events or stereotype characters,” with making the graphic novel as powerful as it is.
And yet, prose and graphic novels are such different media. Was anything lost in the transition? Rhodes doesn’t think so.
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“Nothing was ‘lost’ in the adaptation of Ghost Boys,” she told me. “Rather, it gained in impact and significance.”
In short, the medium itself is not the determining factor in whether a story is better or worse than its other versions: it’s the people behind the story. In this case, the collaborative presence of multiple creative minds, all equally dedicated to retelling an important story, allowed the graphic novel to become even more meaningful than the original.
“Collaborating with other artists […] expands not only audience reach, but allows for more nuanced explorations of my themes and characters,” Rhodes says.
Rhodes expects the same type of joint effort to be necessary should Ghost Boys make the jump from the page to other media.
“I would love to see a film, a TV series, a theatrical version (even a full-cast audio version) of Ghost Boys,” Rhodes says, adding, “I believe the story has enough substance to be honored by other artists in differing mediums. Like Ghost Boys: The Graphic Novel, there’d be new variations created by talented people who make the tale even richer.”
Given that police violence is still on the rise in America as of December 2025, it is clear that Ghost Boys is as tragically relevant as it ever was — and could even play a role in guiding us toward a better future:
“I firmly believe that both versions of Ghost Boys will help youth disentangle and shield themselves from bias and prejudice and help them (all of us) create a more just world.”