MARVIN Wins 1st Place in the 2020 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards — Graphic Novel Category
MARVIN: Based on The Way I Was by Marvin Hamlisch, the graphic novel I adapted, wrote and illustrated, was awarded 1st Place in the Graphic Novel category of the 2020 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards.
Published by Schiffer Publishing Ltd. in 2020, MARVIN is a 64-page illustrated biography of the composer, pianist and conductor Marvin Hamlisch. The book is based on his official autobiography, The Way I Was, written with Gerald Gardner, but it is not a simple condensation of the original text. I approached it as an adaptation in the dramatic sense: selecting, restructuring and translating a life into a work of sequential art, with its own pacing, scene construction and visual rhythm.
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A graphic novel adaptation of Marvin Hamlisch’s life
Marvin Hamlisch was one of the rare artists to achieve PEGOT status — winning a Pulitzer Prize, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. His career stretched across Broadway, Hollywood, concert music and popular culture, but the book begins much earlier: with the son of Viennese Jewish immigrants, his family’s flight from Nazi-occupied Austria, and his early years as a prodigiously gifted child at Juilliard.
For the graphic novel, I wanted to preserve the wit, nervous energy and candor of Hamlisch’s autobiography while making the story function visually for a younger readership and for anyone interested in music, theatre, film and creative perseverance. The adaptation moves through childhood, family life, artistic training, early career frustration and breakthrough moments, including his work with Liza Minnelli, his connection with Barbra Streisand, and the beginning of a career that would eventually make him one of the most awarded composers of the twentieth century.
Adapted, written and illustrated by Ian David Marsden
MARVIN was my first published graphic novel. I handled the adaptation, script, page structure, dialogue compression, character drawing, scene composition, lettering logic and full illustration of the book. That made it a particularly satisfying project: not illustration added after the literary work was complete, but a fully integrated act of graphic novel writing and visual authorship.
Biographical comics require a different kind of discipline from fictional comics. The story already exists, but it still has to be shaped. A chapter in prose may become a single page; one remembered gesture may deserve a full scene; a passage of explanation may need to disappear entirely and be replaced by an image. The work is closer to adapting a memoir for film than to simply “illustrating” a text.
The book was represented by Anna Olswanger of Olswanger Literary LLC in New York, whose editorial guidance and publishing experience were an important part of bringing the project to completion.
Book details
- Title: Marvin: Based on The Way I Was by Marvin Hamlisch
- Adapted, written and illustrated by: Ian David Marsden
- Based on: The Way I Was by Marvin Hamlisch with Gerald Gardner
- Publisher: Schiffer Publishing Ltd.
- Publication year: 2020
- Length: 64 pages
- ISBN: 9780764359040
- Award: 1st Place — 2020 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards, Graphic Novel category
View MARVIN at Schiffer Publishing
A published graphic novel, adapted, written and illustrated by Ian David Marsden
MARVIN was the first full-length graphic novel I wrote and illustrated. It was also a substantial adaptation project: taking Marvin Hamlisch’s autobiography and reshaping it into a concise, readable comic narrative with its own dramatic structure, dialogue rhythm, page turns and visual point of view.
The book brought together several strands of my work that had been present for years — cartooning, character drawing, visual timing, script thinking and editorial compression — but on a larger scale and in a sustained narrative form. It remains one of the projects I am proudest to have completed.
Related work can be found in Cartoons, Comics & Visual Storytelling, Editorial & Educational Illustration, and the fuller project page for MARVIN — A Graphic Novel About the Life of Marvin Hamlisch.
