Make it modern and make it Gay
Kathleen Gros is the writer and artist behind Jo: An Adaptation of "Little Women" and, most recently, Anne: An Adaptation of "Anne of Green Gables." The books take the beloved characters and plotlines of some of Gros's childhood favorites and modernize them. Unlike the originals, they are also undeniably Queer.

"I love Anne of Green Gables. It is one of my absolute favorite books of all time," Gros said. "I read it over and over again when I was a kid. Two years ago... Jo: An Adaptation of "Little Women" [came] out, which again, came from a love of that classic. My agent and I finished talking about potential other adaptations we could do. Anne of Green Gables came up immediately — it's a book that I love."

Gros, who also identifies as Queer, retells these classic stories through a Queer theory lens. She only adapts books that scholars have theorized have an LGBTQ+ subtext, which is often pretty obvious to her.

"The adaptations I do are through a Queer lens," she said. "I look at classic literature that has been able to be interpreted through a Queer lens. Queer folks can kind of see themselves in the story, even if it's not explicitly Queer in the text or the intention of the original author."

Gros said she sees literature as a work of art, one that can be interpreted by the reader. "I think one of the joys of being in the audience is that you get to interpret the work however you like, and adaptations are kind of an avenue of reframing an original work or getting to have a dialogue with it in a way, and getting to bring in different ideas. For me, it was about getting to bring in more personal experiences and women I know who have sort of seen themselves and maybe their first crushes in the relationship between Anne and Diana. Bringing that energy into the work and bringing that experience of the reader into the text felt important to me."

A drawn-out process
What sets Gros's adaptations apart is that she not only reimagines the classic stories as modern and Queer, but she also recreates them into graphic novels. The process of writing and illustrating a full-length novel is long and difficult, but very worth it for Gros.

"Writing a graphic novel is interesting. Everyone does it ...differently, and I'll do it differently with each project," she explained.

"If I'm working with a big publisher, an editor, and an art director, my project is a lot more streamlined. There are very specific steps we have to hit. There are way more people looking at the work, trying to make it the best it can be.

"When I'm working on a personal project, that's very loosey-goosey. I just do whatever I feel like."

Gros' adaptations add even more work, as she has to do her research to make sure her version of the story aligns with the original.

"Writing an adaptation is a lot different than doing any other kind of work," she explained. "Even though I've read Anne of Green Gables several times, I read through it about three times [more] before I started writing the book. I wanted to have it fresh in my mind.

"I was thinking about what elements of the work resonated with me as a kid reading it, and what themes and scenes resonated with me as an adult reading it. I made a list of key themes that are important for the work and then key themes ...for characters, like what's the journey of the character in the broadest sense over the work."

Modernizing a classic
Gros had the challenge of imagining settings for her modern adaptations that keep the same feelings and challenges of the original work but still encompass realistic parts of today.

"For Anne, her biggest arc is feeling out of place and finding a home," she said. "I wanted to make sure that came into the new work, because it is integral to the original story. From there, once I get ...the idea for key scenes and arcs, I have to figure out how to translate these into the 2020s. How do I think of these in a modern setting?"

For historical novels, like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, the setting, clothing, and even transportation methods change the story immensely.

"A big one for me was thinking about insular communities," Gros said. "Anne of Green Gables is set in Prince Edward Island in the original work, which is all small communities, like the small town of Avonlea. My personal experience is living in big cities. I grew up in Toronto, which is actually where L.M. Montgomery [author of Anne of Green Gables] spent a lot of her life. ...So I was thinking about apartment buildings within the city and reimagined Avonlea the town as the Avonlea apartment building. It's not super obvious in the art, but I was basing it off certain areas of Toronto a little bit.

"I also had to figure out how I was going to translate past stuff to today. One of my favorite elements of the original work is the story club that Anne makes with her friends, where they just get together and write these stories together. I kind of skewed that a bit in my retelling, just because I have a big love of zines and that ...DIY mode of communicating and sharing thoughts and art. It feels very like Anne Shirley in a way, so I had her join a zine club... I believe L.M. Montgomery was also a huge scrapbooker, so it was just tying in little elements of different themes surrounding the work."

Rewriting the classics
Once Gros established what changes she'd be making in her adaptation, she plotted out what events from the original books she would include in her graphic novel.

"I will write a synopsis. Essentially just looking at what the different beats are going to be in the story. This happens, then this happens, and it's a couple of thousand words," she explained. "From there I go and write a full script for the book. I write down all the actions, and all the dialogue, and break it down into pages and panels. That goes to my editor, and we do a couple of back-and-forths on it. Once my editor approves it, I go and start the work."

The actual work of creating the novels is the most tedious part.

"I just sit down and knock out a bunch of pages every day for a couple of months," Gros said. "Once we get the rough pages that go back and forth between the editor and the art director, then it comes back to me, and then I go into the final art. Front to back, it's about two years of a process."

And that process is also taxing in physical sense.

"Art is the process that is more challenging on my body, physically," Gros said. "Cartoonists have to be careful about repetitive strain injuries and taking care of our bodies, because you can hurt yourself just sitting and drawing, which sounds goofy but it's true. Drawing is really hard on the body."

Not only is drawing physically exhausting, but it takes a lot more time than writing, she added. "With drawing I know I can sit down... and get a certain amount of work done [in a day]. I know I can just sit down and do it. Writing is challenging differently: you can't necessarily sit down and write for eight hours in a day — at least I've found that I can't. I have to take little detours, putter around the house a bit, let the brain work, and then sit down and get out about two or three good hours of writing.

"Writing takes a lot less time [than drawing]. I write the script for a graphic novel in about two to three months, and it takes twice that to draw it. Just to get the rough draft it takes me five or six months, and then that again to do the final art. It is a much more labor-intensive to draw. You can write, 'They walked into a crowded room' — and then that's a full day...just to draw a crowded room. They're both challenging in different ways, and gratifying in different ways."

Unlike many modern graphic novel artists, Gros prefers to start all her artwork by hand.

"The first part of the process is I draw everything out on paper," she explained. "I just like the way that pencil feels on paper. I find that on the computer, the ability to zoom in and out while you're drawing messes with my sense of proportion. Other people are great at that, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't work with my brain. So I just do it on paper with pencil, and then I scan those in to do the final art."

She used to ink all her work by hand, too, but found that with multiple edits, the computer was a quicker way to get the job done.

Weren't they always a little Gay?
The least challenging work for Gros is finding the Queer subtext in her favorite pieces of literature.

"I don't think the queerness of it was difficult at all," she said. "It's so incredibly easy to look at the original text and interpret it through a Queer lens, whether or not that was the original intent of the author, which I don't think it was."

Her latest novel, Anne, centers around the very romantic friendship between Anne and Diana. "There's a certain kind of very intense friendship that a lot of Queer folks have when they're very young that is reflected in Anne and Diana," Gros said. "They exchange locks of hair and profess their love for each other. Anne has a full emotional tantrum accidentally imagining Diana growing up and marrying a man. I think a lot of Queer readers can relate to that sense of 'oh, I love this person so much, and I don't know if they feel the same way. I don't even fully understand what these feelings are, because they haven't been explained to me or presented in a way that I could recognize.' So I don't think that was the difficult part at all."

Finding content is the easy part, but cutting things out is what Gros finds the most challenging. "The hardest part about an adaptation, going from a novel to a graphic novel, is everything you have to cut out. You just can't fit everything in, and there are a couple of things where it's too bad I couldn't get it in," she said.

Some of Gros' favorite scenes from the original Anne of Green Gables that couldn't make it in include the amethyst brooch and Anne and Diana's tea party, the latter of which provides mountains of Queer subtext for the iconic character.

Despite having to cut out several great scenes, Gros is proud to say that all the major characters from Anne of Green Gables make appearances in the book. However, if readers are hoping to see nods to L.M. Montgomery's other Anne books, they won't find them in Gros's adaptation. She admits she could never get through the sequels.

"I feel like Anne of Green Gables itself is just a complete work [such] that ...going beyond that didn't ever really resonate with me as much as the first book," she said.

However, Gros hopes readers not only make it through her adaptation of Anne but also enjoy the direction she's taken the iconic character.

"I hope they have a good time reading it; that's always what I hope. When I'm making something, I always want to create a little world where someone can go away in it for a little bit and enjoy just existing somewhere else for a moment. That's the main thing that I hope readers take away from it.

"I've also snuck in a lot about zine making and telling your own story, so it would be cool if people could step away from that, too, and get inspired to create their own stories and art."

Louisa May Alcott's biggest fan
Gros first got the idea to adapt classic literature into graphic novels in high school.

"I've always had this idea in the back of my mind that it would be really fun to do a modern-day adaptation," she recalled. "Back when I was a teenager, I thought this would be fun, because it has so many themes that could be transposed to any time and any person, really."

Gros describes herself as a Little Women superfan. Even as a teenager, she knew she wanted to adapt the story someday.

"At its core, it's about four sisters growing up and their different personalities," she said. "Just by chance, I wound up connecting with an agent — who is now my agent — who had an interest in pitching a modern-day Little Women graphic novel, and I was like, 'Oh, I've always wanted to do that. I have ideas about that. Let's talk.' We sort of hit it off, and she's been my agent ever since."

The idea of making LGBTQ+-specific adaptations came to her after Gros analyzed the main protagonist of Little Women, Jo.

"So many Queer women can see themselves in Jo. So many people in general can see themselves in Jo," Gros said. "She has this friction in her life — with the expectations set for her as a woman in 1800s society — and they're so not in line with the things that she wants from her life. She plays the role of the son or the boy within her family, and I think a lot of Queer women can see that in themselves when they're young.

"I think you can also see it through a Trans lens if you want, for sure. That whole way of being. Not to say this is every Queer girl's experience, but it was my own and some of my friends' — that friction of the expectations around you of how you have to act as a woman, and feeling real outside of that. ...The doting brother role that she plays feels so Queer in so many ways."

Rewriting Jo to be an explicitly Queer character gave Gros the space to add more dimensions to some of the character's actions, including her iconic rejection of her love interest.

"[It's] one of my absolute favorite scenes in Little Women," she said, "and this is so controversial, because so many feel that Jo and Laurie should have been together, and it's messed up that they're not together at the end of the book, which is fine.

"[But] I love that they do not get together. One of my absolute favorite scenes in the original book is when Laurie professes his love to Jo and she says, 'I cannot love you like that. I do not love you like that. I love you, but I do not love you like that.' That very much can be [interpreted] through a Queer lens. I also think it's a very powerful scene in general, especially for young girls.

"I think we get a lot of narratives that are 'Oh, if someone likes you, you probably like them back,' but there's a lot of power in being like, 'Just because someone likes you or has feelings for you, you don't have to reciprocate that, and that's okay.' You don't have to step into a romantic relationship with them. You can stay really good friends if that's how you feel."

As far as other adaptations of her favorite books go, Gros doesn't have plans to revisit classic literature anytime soon. Instead, she is content to rewatch Greta Gerwig's Little Women, which she believes is one of the best adaptations of the novel yet.

"I think it is the best Little Women adaptation. It is very smart, I think it's very fun. Just being a huge Louisa May Alcott fan, I know they did a bunch of stuff that nodded to [her] as a person."

Writing an original story
While she won't be adapting anything, Gros will be spending the next year focusing on an entirely new story she's creating.

"I am working on another book right now," she said. "I just finished the script... It is an original work, so it is not an adaptation. It's called Carousel Summer, and it should be out in 2024.

"The story is about this girl who is stuck in the summer between grades 7 and 8 in this small town in rural Ontario. Her best friend has abandoned her for the summer by going away to ...camp. They're writing letters back and forth to each other to keep in contact and tell each other everything that's happening. She's ready for the summer to be super boring, the worst summer ever.

"Then this artist comes to town with her daughter who is about the same age as our protagonist. The artist has a grant from the Canadian government to reimagine and rebuild this historic carousel that used to stand by the harbor in town. Her daughter and the protagonist become friends, and a crush develops... which tells the story of their summer together. There's [also] a subplot about developers coming to the town and gentrification and housing insecurity."

While Carousel Summer still won't be out for another year, fans of Gros's works can always check out Jo and Anne, as well as her many self-published short comics at https://www.kagcomix.com/.