Publishers Weekly’s Calvin
Reid couldn’t help himself: he injected a mild note of wonderment into his
report about the impending arrival of a new graphic novel: “It had to happen,”
he said, continuing: “Following the success of Quirk Book's best-selling
transformation of Jane Austen's
classic novel Pride and Prejudice
into, well, a zombie novel, 
Del Rey Books announced plans to turn the result,
Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice
and Zombies, into a graphic novel” to be published in 2010. Zombies and
vampires festoon the newsstands — and now, the bookstalls. Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, Amanda Gange’s sequel to Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennett’s beau/husband
reveals his true nature (vampirism is the reason he’s so moody), arrives in
early August. Then, still plowing up Jane Austen’s ground, comes Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
in which, quoth Carol Memmott in USA
Today, Austen’s Colonel Brandon has tentacles growing out of his chin. Coming
in December, a pair of Austen enhancements: Darcy’s
Hunger: A Vampire Retelling of Jane Austen’s Price and Prejudice by Regina
Jeffers and Jane Bites Back by
Michael Thomas Ford. And Grange is working on a Pride and Prejudice prequel about Darcy the vampire. Next, I
suppose, the graphic novel versions of them all. It is inevitable: writers and
publishers are desperate to find things to write about that won’t make some
cluster of concerned humanity angry enough to protest and rush, frothing at the
mouth, to the barricades with picket signs. The undead, presumably, can’t
protest. And vampires? Well, they’re always out for blood anyhow. But why pick
on proper little Jane Austen? She’s probably throwing up in her reticule.
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