Illustrator Jules Scheele is known for his work on graphic nonfiction guides to gender and sexuality, notably an Icon Books trilogy written by activist-academic Meg-John Barker. Scheele’s first solo effort, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s seminal queer novel Orlando (Avery Hill, June), tasked him with selecting the most pertinent lines of the original text to tell a complete story in an illustrated format, an opportunity he was eager to take.

What’s your history with Orlando?

I read it for the first time as a teenager. I loved Virginia Woolf and I definitely felt a connection, but I was very dissociated from gender at the time, so I didn’t go back to it. I was scared. I was scared to watch the Sally Potter movie for a long time as well, but I watched it after I transitioned and absolutely loved it. Around the same time, I got an email from publisher Ricky Miller at Avery Hill about doing a graphic novel adaptation. I immediately said yes. I got excited about rereading the book with my new understanding of gender, and this seemed like a great opportunity to make a solo graphic novel but have the safety of it being an adaptation. Then I got nervous about adapting it wrong or not doing the book justice.

Can you talk about your artistic style and rich palette choices?

I wanted to use color to explore the narrative. Orlando has so many big feelings, and I wanted the reader to disappear into those. Bright colors elicit a reaction in me. It’s like dopamine. I also wanted to do something different from the fashion of comics for adults being brown and gray and realistic. I hate the idea that for something to be serious, it needs to have a neutral tone. I wanted Orlando to feel magical, beginning to end.

How do you see transness functioning in Woolf’s novel?

There’s so much absurdity in gender presentation and the societal rules of it. Woolf was a great observer of that in a satirical way, and we have that in our communities now. One of my favorite memes is when someone claims “the two genders” are two random things. It’s the opposite of the rigorous idea that you can only be trans if you check certain boxes. There’s a case for being robust about making fun of gender and the foibles and expectations of our conditioning. The driving force of the book is that Orlando refuses to dwell on her transition. She’s the exact same person, and Woolf doesn’t hold hands and ask uneducated questions. Gender is fluid. Transition affects Orlando materially, but from her point of view, she’s just trying new things and having a good time. She misses running people through with a rapier, but there are other things she enjoys.

Why has Orlando endured as an important piece of queer literature?

There’s so much we can still get out of it. Parts of it are really dated—there’s so much Orientalism—but the central message is searching for identity and realizing you have multiple. It’s impossible to distill someone down to a single thing. The narrative is so loose and opens up so many possibilities. Every adaptation of Orlando is so different. They’re all so experimental and they all have the artist’s voice represented so profoundly, whether it’s Sally Potter or an academic like Paul B. Preciado. It’s a text that inspires creativity.

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