Rick Atkinson's Revolutionary War trilogy to be adapted into graphic editions

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NEW YORK (AP) — Prize-winning military historian Rick Atkinson, a comic book fan growing up, hadn't imagined his own work being suitable for the illustrated format.

Ten Speed Graphic announced Tuesday that a graphic edition of “The British Are Coming,” the first volume of Atkinson's acclaimed Revolutionary War trilogy, will be out next June, shortly before the country's 250th anniversary. Five more graphic books are planned, to be written by Nora Neus and illustrated by Federico Pietrobon, with Atkinson in close collaboration.

“They are entirely amenable to my suggestions, ‘This isn’t quite right,’ or ‘I think this needs to be explained,’” Atkinson told The Associated Press. “With the drawings, I pointed out that John Adams, at the time the revolution began was a relatively young man. And they had made him look like the paunchy, bald John Adams of the vice presidency. And they fixed it.”

Atkinson, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his World War II book “An Army at Dawn,” has been working on his revolutionary trilogy for a decade and published the second volume, “The Fate of the Day,” this spring. Widely regarded as among the best living military historians, he was a featured commentator in Ken Burns' “The American Revolution” documentary and has made numerous joint appearances with the filmmaker. He is currently working on the final book of his trilogy.

The author says that he was initially skeptical about the new project. With early memories of Superman comics, he wondered how any illustrator might adapt deeply-researched books that run longer than 500 pages. But the graphic format has been used on everything from “The Odyssey” to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. Atkinson changed his mind after Ten Speed Graphic, a Penguin Random House imprint, sent him several adaptations, including of the life of Frederick Douglass and Timothy Snyder's “On Tyranny.”

“I saw that the comic books of my youth have evolved considerably and I was enthused about it,” Atkinson said. “They said, ‘We acknowledge this is serious history that you do. We don’t intend to dumb it down. Our ambition is to widen the audience, to pitch this story of the American founding to an audience that perhaps might be intimidated by a 560 page book.'”