Orlando-A Graphic Novel Review

TITLE: Orlando

Written and Drawn: Jules Scheele

Adapted from Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

Publisher: Avery Hill

Release Date: June 18th, 2026

Price: $21.99

Reviewed by: Ben Crane

Solicit: A powerful and essential graphic novel adaptation of a vital British classic.

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel 'Orlando' tells the story of a poet adrift in time; he starts out his life as a nobleman in Queen Elizabeth I’s court, and her story concludes as a thirty-six year-old woman in the present. Jules Scheele’s graphic novel adaptation of this important queer work tells the complete story and examines the shifting and changing ideas of gender and sexuality, and plumbs the depths of the human heart.

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Review

Orlando is a strange and delightful book, mercurial in the most literal sense of the word—liquid and amorphous, resisting every attempt to pin it down, it slips and flits away with deft agility, dancing always just beyond rigid definition. You don’t quite understand me yet, it teases, holding forth that adverb “yet” with tantalizing poise. Consider me but a moment more, and perhaps you shall.

How then, to approach reviewing this flighty thing? I will speak of it first as a singular book in and of itself, and then as an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic Orlando: A Biography.

Orlando - reviewed

Orlando is the story of Orlando, a British nobleman born in the back half of the sixteenth century who winds his way aimlessly across the history of the British empire. The story relies on two entirely unexamined pieces of magic which simply occur. The first, which receives neither fanfare nor even direct recognition, is that Orlando ages supernaturally slowly. The second, which is acknowledged but never explained, is that, at the book’s midpoint, Orlando becomes a woman.

The book tracks Orlando from the 1500s to the 1900s, across her career as courtier, patron of the arts, idle noble, ambassador, poet, bon vivant, and a dozen more roles, seeking always a bit more satisfaction and meaning from a world that she never quite understands or feels a part of. Though she finds lovers and friends, acquaintances and enemies, a husband and a child, she is always moving, always redefining who she is, in pursuit of something that she can ill define.

But the plot of the book and Orlando’s life is largely secondary here. This is a comic that lives and dies on emotion. It is illustrated with impressionistic whimsy that conveys the feelings of this ever-shifting pursuit far more directly than the facts. The details of Orlando’s doings and emotional state are related to us through narration delivered sometimes by the people that surround her, sometimes by animals passing by, and only rarely by the subject herself.

Let me pause. I am doing a bad job explaining this.

Orlando is a whirlwind celebration of queer and trans joy. It is an explosion of delight at the revelation that we contain multitudes. That we contain the capacity to reinvent ourselves at a whim. That we can wake up one morning and declare ourselves something entirely anew and find a community to support and embrace us. That this new us lived within the old us all along; we are not some singular thing to be summarized in a word—man, woman, gay, straight, poet, noble, monogamous, orgiastic, chaste—but the summation of all these things, and that we can change between them as we see fit.

This is a book that resists easy summarization, whose message cannot be contained in a single sentence or paragraph or essay, because we resist summarization. It leaves us not with a rational message that we can carry forth, but rather with a feeling of joy and potential. It is not a book that everyone will enjoy—though show me the book that is and I’ll show you a book with nothing to say—but it is a vital book, full of all the same strange twists and false starts as life itself.

Orlando - adapted

In her recent review of the recent film adaptation of The Odyssey, translator Emily Wilson observed that “adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation. Some of the best radically transform or resist the source material.” In taking on Woolf’s seminal novel Orlando: A Biography, cartoonist Jules Scheele has chosen to focus almost exclusively on the parts of that book about gender and sexuality, moving it up to a modern understanding of both. The result is something both greater and less than the original, and also something uniquely Scheele’s.

He has chosen to remove almost all of Woolf’s musings—both direct and indirect—on the literary canon, the purpose of poetry, the conflict between biography and fiction, and the shiftings of literary styles. I understand this choice. It would be nigh impossible to maintain them in a 140-page graphic novel. However, vestiges of them remain, both large—such as in the recurring character of poet and critic Nicholas Greene—and small—in unexplained imagery and turns of phrase lifted from the source material without the necessary context of its metaphorical framework. And these moments feel particularly confusing in a book that already stretches and strains at the boundary between representational and purely impressionistic.

The graphic novel also loses some of the more playful and whimsical aspects of Woolf’s novel by being, paradoxically, a more whimsical and playful form. We are simply more used to cartoonists engaging with the absurd and the abstract than we are to high modernists. When Woolf interrupts a page-long sentence comparing the modernists’ flare for formal extravagance to the more direct style Elizabethan playwrights to excoriate herself for indulging in exactly the self-congratulatory linguistic onanism that she is decrying, it is all the more effective for how jarring the insertion of the silly and personal is in the staid surroundings. By working in a medium often viewed—however unfairly—as less serious, Scheele is unable to deploy this to such great effect.

What Scheele is able to do, on the other hand, is create a more focused, nuanced, and modern novel. He is able to highlight the aspects of Woolf’s novel that have made it a classic of queer and trans literature and reinforce them with a hundred years of additional critical and philosophical understanding. Woolf’s discussions of clothing as mask and gender and costume are made more visceral by simple illustrations. Her sometimes vague examinations of our shifting identities and the bidirectional influence of culture and self on each other are crystalized. And Scheele brings a palpable sense of queer discovery and joy generally and trans discovery and joy specifically that isn’t nearly as forward in Woolf’s original.

In the end, I will say this: Scheele’s Orlando is made stronger by a prior understanding of Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. Knowing the novel will cover some rough spots in the graphic novel and bring greater depth to its pages.

But I will also add this: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography is made stronger by a prior understanding of Scheele’s Orlando. The graphic novel brings clarity of both meaning and purpose to some of the more muddled sections of the original, enhancing and deepening our understanding of them.

 I hope that this book inspires people to go back and read Woolf’s. I also hope fans of Woolf’s novel will pick up and read this. Each is made greater for the other’s existence.

Orlando - concluded

I hope you’ll forgive me if this review has been disjointed or meandering, overly familiar or overly formal. I find myself slightly unmoored in the wake of this book. If the shape and tone of this review has not put you off, then I encourage you to take a chance on Orlando. Perhaps you will be more successful in trapping the quicksilver beneath your palm and rendering forth a simple verdict. I am content to let it dance and drift. It is a celebration of life and joy, and life is spent in pursuit of meaning, not holding it. Joy is to be found in seeking out our ever-shifting selves. We are not held down, but set free by the realization that there is no singular truth.

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