When Fred Fordham was a child, an aunt gave him a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic fantasy novel from 1968. The book was a favorite that his aunt read to her own children. “I didn’t read it at the time,” Fordham says, “it got left on the shelf. I was a shade too young for it.”

Years later, Fordham—today an accomplished artist who has created graphic novel adaptations of classics like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—was approached by Theo Downes-Le Guin, son of the author, who died in 2018. Would Fordham be interested in adapting one of his mother’s books?

The result, after several years of work, is A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel, which Clarion Books published this spring. In exquisite, painterly images, Fordham retells the story of Ged, a lowborn boy with magical abilities who must grapple with his own pride and folly—not to mention a dark spirit that he has inadvertently unleashed—before coming into his inheritance as a powerful mage. In a starred review, a Kirkus critic said it was “a beloved cornerstone of the genre brought vividly to life through striking illustrations.”

With Downes-Le Guin’s blessing, Fordham dedicated the book to his aunt. “Sadly, she died while I was working on this graphic novel, so she never got to see it,” Fordham explains. “There’s a real poignancy to it.”

On a Zoom call from his home in London, Fordham, 39, discussed the brilliance of Le Guin’s writing and the unique challenges of presenting the story in a visual format. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You didn’t read A Wizard of Earthsea when you were given it as a child. Did you encounter Le Guin’s work again later in life?

When I was at university, I studied philosophy and came across a short story that Le Guin wrote, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which is just a lovely philosophical thought experiment. That’s a big part of Le Guin’s appeal, I think—being a poet and a philosopher first, and then a storyteller who makes those things interesting and palatable. I do consider myself a real fan now.

How did this graphic novel come about?

Theo got in touch with me in 2020. The original idea was to do one of his mother’s big science fiction novels, The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness. I read them and thought they were extraordinary, but both books would have involved so much worldbuilding and so much time that we probably couldn’t make the maths add up for a publisher.

At first, there was some apprehension about A Wizard of Earthsea because it has a complicated history with adaptation. [The author disliked a 2004 miniseries that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel.—Ed.]  But then it did have the practical benefit—alongside being an extraordinarily poetic story—of being relatively short and also having enough of a devoted fan base that it wouldn’t seem quite so crazy for a publisher to take a chance on it. By this point, Theo and I had been in touch for quite a while, and I considered him a friend. We trusted each other and had similar instincts.

What do you look for in a book you might want to adapt?

Can I make it look interesting? Earthsea has got the potential to be visually spectacular. Then there’s the question of whether it could plausibly work in sequential storytelling. One of the trapdoors under a graphic novel adaptation is essentially doing the text with illustrations. But there’s something about comics and graphic novels as a medium that’s different to prose literature and different to film. I still don’t feel intelligent enough to wax philosophical about it. Have you ever read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics?

Funny, we interviewed McCloud for our Graphic Lit Issue too. But I haven’t read that book, no.

I do recommend it to anyone interested in storytelling—it’s the best analysis of the medium that I’ve read. But the answer to your question is that it does depend on the text. In the case of Earthsea, it’s tricky, because it doesn’t have much dialogue—it’s told very like a fable. Whereas, with To Kill a Mockingbird, it was so straightforward. There’s so much beautiful dialogue that you just draw the narration and have the characters say the lines, and that’s kind of it. But we thought that Earthsea, so long as we kept the narrator’s voice, could work sequentially and look spectacular. It could be a slightly unconventional graphic novel. And I think that comes out in the art style, where we moved away from the traditional line art.

I wanted to ask you about the artwork. It’s gorgeous, but it’s not conventional, as you say. Is it watercolors?

It’s almost all digital, actually, although I do mix in watercolor washes and things. I come from a traditional painting background. This is just a purely personal aesthetic bias, but I don’t particularly like that slightly plasticky look that you get with some mainstream comics. I like texture. I like something that looks like it could exist in the real world. So I try mixing textures and things to make it feel like an actual piece of art. I’ve come to realize that the thing that really matters is the story. You don’t need to make something look like a comic for it to have all the benefits of the medium. This adaptation is not beat-by-beat storytelling, which the cartoon style of drawing lends itself to. It’s much more gently paced and philosophical, and so this painterly style felt like it worked.

In the case of a realistic novel like To Kill a Mockingbird, there’s historical research you can do to recreate the world. How do you go about creating the look of Le Guin’s imagined world?

Le Guin had written quite a few notes that Theo shared, which were very, very helpful. She didn’t want the Viking machismo or fairy twee of conventional swords-and-sorcery fantasy. Earthsea is a preindustrial fantasy world, so anytime from ancient Rome to the late Middle Ages and, I suppose, up until the Industrial Revolution—but it had to feel real. I didn’t have to do lots of elaborate conceptual research. I could mostly just look at historical clothing and paintings to use as reference. The other helpful thing is that she didn’t want the magic to be all kinds of pyrotechnics and garishness, either. It ended up being a relatively grounded thing.

What do you hope readers take away from your treatment of the book?

For people who already love the original, I would hope that this feels like a sincere effort to faithfully portray the story in a new medium. Le Guin’s prose is so poetic; I hope that some of that tone has been captured. As for new readers, I suppose it’s the same thing: I hope that it does something like what the original novel does, and I hope that it feels visually exciting enough to stand as a worthy accompaniment.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.