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As comic books — or, in more highbrow parlance, graphic novelizations — nudge their way onto the shelves of bookstores and the pages of literary magazines, some well-known writers are trying

their hand at the genre. Pop-culture icon Joss Whedon, best-selling novelist Jodi Picoult and rapper Percy Carey are among those feeling the lure of comics. PLUMBING THE DEPTHS OF STORY Of

the three, perhaps the attraction to graphic novels was most natural for Joss Whedon, creator of the TV series _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ and _Angel_. As the son of the lead writer for _The

Electric Company_, Whedon developed a fascination with comics at an early age, when his father brought home a stack of Marvel comics. He was hooked immediately. "I'm like,

'What's all this? What's all this that will now obsess me for the _rest of my life_,'" he recalls. Despite his interest in comics, Whedon hadn't considered the

possibility of extending _Buffy_ in graphic-novel form until Dark Horse Comics called just as the series was finishing its run. "It kind of fell into my lap," Whedon says of

_Buffy's_ transition from screen to page. Whedon says Dark Horse allowed him to "plumb the depths" of the _Buffy_ story in a new genre, and also introduced him to what he

calls "a different kind of fandom." "They care much more about two-dimensional people than they do about three-dimensional [ones]," he says of his comic fans. "You

can evoke ire that you've never dreamed of in TV." A NOVELIST LEARNS THE ART OF COMICS For author Jodi Picoult, it was a story within her novel _The Tenth Circle_ that opened the

door to comic-book writing. Part of that book was written in the form of a graphic novel, and the approach caught the eye of editors at DC Comics. They contacted Picoult about writing

several issues of the recently relaunched _Wonder Woman_ series. It was an opportunity Picoult nearly passed on. "I got this e-mail from an editor at DC, and I remember thinking,

'That's really nice but I don't have any time,'" says Picoult. "I went downstairs to have dinner with my family and I was telling my kids that I'd gotten

this e-mail and my three kids just looked at me and said 'Mom, you totally have to write _Wonder Woman_.'" But, as Picoult learned, writing in the sequential art form required

a different set of skills from the ones she had honed as a novelist. "I almost have to [write] more like I imagine a director would than a novelist," says Picoult. "That

visualization of how the words are going to play out on the page and where ... the camera angle would swoop in to the scene. That was really foreign to me." Despite the differences in

the writing process, Picoult sees a direct parallel between the graphic novel and other forms of literature: "In all the years that I've been writing — 15 years now — there's

only one genre that's really debuted in _The New York Times Book Review_, and that's the graphic novel," says Picoult. "And that tells me that someone's taking them

really seriously as a form of literature." GIVING AUTOBIOGRAPHY THE GRAPHIC TREATMENT For Percy Carey, who raps under the stage name MF Grimm, writing graphic novels meant not just

learning to speak a new language, but also appreciating the value of the story he was telling. While Whedon and Picoult were dealing with the fantastic, Carey's graphic novel,

_Sentences_, is an autobiographical account of the shooting that left him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. The idea that he could tell his story as a graphic novel came to him after

he discovered _American Splendor_, a series of comics based on author Harvey Pekar's life. "Once I came across _American Splendor_, it convinced me that I wanted to take a chance

and step in the medium of graphic novels. I just have a lot of respect for the form," says Carey. "I realized that if I tell my story appropriately, maybe I could save the lives of

others that might feel that certain things are cool or there's no repercussion behind certain actions." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.