A boy and his father make their way across a post-apocalyptic America. Destroyed beyond recognition in an unexplained, cataclysmic event, this world is empty and dangerous. Marauders and cannibals roam freely. Even the sky has turned against humanity, filled with poison in some horrific event we can only assume was man-made.

The Road is perhaps Cormac McCarthy’s most successful work. Released in 2006, the book, which deviates from his usual Western inclinations, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Two years later, it became a Hollywood movie starring Viggo Mortensen and a young Kodi Smit-McPhee. Now, The Road is taking on a new form: the graphic novel.

French cartoonist Manu Larcenet brings McCarthy’s dark epic to life with detailed linework and black-and-white imagery. Larcenet’s drawings go beyond anything Hollywood could ever bring to the screen, showing the true sadness and depravity of The Road. The entire project was also approved by McCarthy himself, though the author died in June 2023 before he could see the final product.

Ahead of his graphic novel’s U.S. release, Inverse interviewed Larcenet to find out how he discovered The Road, his thoughts on the story’s ambiguous ending, and the story behind some of his favorite images from the adaptation.

In its second season, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power isn't just moving full steam ahead into the conflict between the Elves and Sauron (Charlie Vickers) that is at the heart of the Second Age. It is also finding unexpected, sometimes ingenious ways to fit in elements from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books that aren’t featured in Peter Jackson's beloved adaptations of the author's work. The Prime Video series has, for instance, found space in its second season for the mysterious, eccentric Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear) — a powerful being that Jackson and his collaborators famously chose to exclude from their Fellowship of the Ring adaptation.

The latest episode of The Rings of Power Season 2, titled "Eldest," also features a sequence in which Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and the rest of their Elvish scout party find themselves surrounded by restless, hungry spirits. It's a set piece that will likely come as a spooky surprise to those unfamiliar with Tolkien's written works. For book readers, however, it’ll probably be seen as both a dubious, canon-breaking bit of original material and an attempt to give them something they've been waiting 23 years or more to see.