The Great Gatsby Gets a Queer, POC-Centered Retelling
A classic of American literature is being reimagined with queer characters and people of color at its center.Jeremy Holt and Felipe Cunha’s Gatsby, an eight-issue graphic novel series debuting in November from comics publisher and independent developer AWA Studios, gives F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby a makeover for the 2020s. It depicts Singaporean student Lu Zhao spending a summer on to Long Island with his rich cousin Tommy before attending Columbia University, and Lu’s experience reflects that of the narrator of the original novel, Midwesterner Nick Carraway.Like Nick, Lu encounters opulent parties at a neighboring mansion, but he deals with 21st-century temptations like online fraud and designer drugs, where Nick was exposed to 1920s-era vices like bootlegging and gambling in the world of Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker.
But the graphic series is similar to Fitzgerald’s novel in portraying the corruption of wealth and the elusiveness of the American Dream.Fitzgerald’s book is one of the most enduring and esteemed works of American literature, considered by some to be the great American novel.
It was acclaimed upon its publication, then largely forgotten until the 1950s, a decade after Fitzgerald’s death, but since then it has been a fixture of in high school and college literature courses.
