When Nick Long imagines a room—a classroom, for example—he doesn't just see it. He hears it, and feels it. "What do the chairs look like?" he asks. "What does the rug feel like as they're walking? What does that feel like, [when you're] a kid and your shoes are heavy?"
Those are examples of the questions Long asked himself when designing the sound for the audiobook adaptation of The Talk, the acclaimed graphic memoir by Darrin Bell (and one of PW’s top 10 books of 2023). The author, who narrated the audiobook himself, appreciated the attention to detail.
"I feel like I'm there," said Bell about listening to the finished production. "I feel like I'm back in 1981 and I'm a kid again, and I hope that listeners have the same experience."
The author, who both wrote and drew The Talk, wasn't initially thinking about an audio adaptation. As he wrote, though, Bell read the text aloud to himself.
"I always speak things aloud, so I can judge whether it sounds authentic or not," the author explained. "If I had been recording myself the whole time I was creating the book, we could have just used that!"
The adaptation, released in August by Macmillan Audio, is part of a growing segment of the audiobook field, explained Michele Cobb, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association.
"Graphic novels didn't really exist outside comic books as part of publishing 20 years ago," she said. "As they've been integrated into the publishing cycle, audio publishers have realized, 'Oh yeah, we can do this!'"
Often, as with The Talk, graphic novels are adapted in the style of radio plays, with sound design providing context for dialogue read by actors. In the case of The Talk, Bell's first-person narration knits the story together.
"You're creating a composition, and that composition is going to bloom visuals in the mind of your listener,” said Simone Barros, director of The Talk audiobook. "But you're also really moving them through time, the way music moves through time, the way cinema moves through time."
Audiobooks, Barros pointed out, were first developed as an assistive technology. While accessibility is reason enough to undertake the challenge of translating images into sound, an audio production also brings the story to life in a new way.
"This was a person that lived this, and you really get that, because it becomes physical. The voice is physical," said Barros. "A human being is right with us, and in our mind."
The title of The Talk refers to the conversations Black parents have with their children about racism. As such, Bell said, it was important to him to have his own son's voice in the audiobook.
"I basically wrote the book for my son," Bell said. So he told the team at Macmillan Audio, "It would mean the world to me to have him play himself in the book."
As a first step in the production process, Ronald Young Jr. was hired to adapt Bell's book into a script. Young incorporated Bell's text from the book, adding and expanding passages of narration to describe purely visual elements that were important to the story.
"I didn't have to give too much input, because he captured most of the action beautifully," said Bell. "The two challenging spots were the epilogue and the final scene with my father."
In print, the book's epilogue is wordless. So Young composed a passage of narration for Bell to read as part of the audiobook version in order to convey the action and its significance. Although the epilogue is only seven pages long, Bell said, he and the adapter spent an hour talking about it before Young sat down to put the images into words.
The other difficult scene Bell mentioned is a poignant passage in which the adult author revisits an interaction with his own father at a past moment in time. With input from Bell, Young worked to communicate the scene's meaning without sacrificing the illustrations' emotional subtlety. "That was hard to convey in words without spelling it out too much," Bell said.
Once the script was ready, the author, his son Emyree Zazu Bell, and actors Brittany Bradford and William DeMeritt stepped into recording studio booths to voice their parts separately, with Bradford and DeMeritt each portraying multiple characters. Barros said that, while in some productions the actors record together, the specific demands of The Talk lent themselves to individual sessions for the different actors. "Their performance approach is going to be easiest for them to move through one character, record that character, move through the next character," she said.
A clear directorial vision is crucial in an expansive production like The Talk, Barros explained. Because such productions involve more people and a higher order of complexity than a conventional audiobook, they're more expensive: asking actors to perform numerous takes isn't feasible.
"Where I come into that is understanding those budget constraints so that I am being considerate of everyone's time," explained Barros. "Both [actor and director] have to have craft, and both of us have to share language." For example, he noted, "I don't say 'clipped' when what I mean is something else."
Once the voice recording was finished, Long incorporated the voice performances into a fully realized soundscape that included original music composed by Young. Long knew, he explained, that the audio effects had to both complement and extend the spoken words—in addition to reflecting the absent images.
As with Young's adapted narration, Long's work involved conveying the ambiguities of certain scenes that, in the print book, rely heavily on image to convey meaning. One example Long offered was a scene in which a young Bell jostles with his brother to board a school bus while being, the boy fears, pursued.
"The specifics of the timing" in the recording, explained Long, "can actually tell you how a little kid felt about his older brother getting on the bus before him."
The sound of dogs is a recurring motif in the audiobook, evoking a sense of dread when Bell encounters racist hostility. Although the sound's meaning is inescapable, the specific nature of the sound had to vary throughout the audiobook.
"How far away are these [animals]?" Long would ask himself. "They are supposed to be out of sight, but within earshot. They're not always barking. If you can hear growling, but you don't know where it is ... hopefully we got pretty close to how unsettling that would be."
As Long put the pieces together, he and Barros collaborated to fill perceived gaps in the storytelling by bringing the actors back for additional dialogue recording, known as ADR in the business. There were "things that aren't scripted that we needed to flesh out," explained Barros. "You walk into a classroom, you need to hear people speaking."
Since The Talk unfolds against the backdrop of American history, it was important to Bell that authentic archival recordings were used whenever possible to represent historic events. That meant delving into the question of rights. Some such audio—remarks made during official White House events, for example—is considered public domain. In other cases, clips had to be recreated using sound effects and the actors' voices. Nevertheless, Bell said, "I pushed for it. It was just necessary."
This part of the process occasionally proved as difficult emotionally as it was logistically. One clip heard in the audiobook, for instance, is audio from the home video recording of Rodney King's beating by police. "Getting that, letting that breathe, and letting that be awful was really hard," said Long.
The audiobook team had only about six weeks, once the script was ready, to bring the production together. Barros said she's proud of the complexity of the finished production, including the actors' nuanced performances. The audiobook, said the director, "gives us a sense of the anxiety of the fallacy of race."
Among audiobooks, it's not only graphic novels and memoirs that get such richly produced adaptations. "There's a whole company called Graphic Audio which makes these dramatizations that are not based on graphic novels, necessarily," Cobb pointed out.
Due in part to the expense of such adaptations, though, they aren't typical. When it comes to the market share for audio dramatizations, "It's still small compared to the one person narrating an audiobook that's the majority of titles today," Cobb added. "These are still not the norm of what's done by an everyday audio publisher, but I do see this happening more and more."
At the moment, Bell said, he's working on another graphic memoir and a graphic novel for middle-grade readers. He said that the experience of adapting The Talk won't change the way he works: "I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing things and sticking to what I know I'm good at, which is creating the imagery and telling the story."
But would he participate in another audio adaptation, if the opportunity arose? "Yeah," affirmed the author. "In a heartbeat."
