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 stark 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.

“He died and only saw half of the album before we could communicate,” Larcenet tells Inverse. “I was only told that he was both happy and impressed by it, which is both too little and a lot.”

Ahead of his graphic novel’s U.S. release, Inverse interviewed Larcenet via email 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.