Feiwel Series to Put New Faces and Spins on Classics

 1. What appealed to you about the concept of/ theory behind Reclaimed Classics—and why do you think the timing of its launch is especially propitious or relevant?

Funnily enough, the first story I ever wrote as a kid was a re-telling of a classic. I stayed after classes in one of those after school programs to do my homework. If you finished your homework, they had this binder full of photocopied comics to read (so we didn't trash the originals, not because they had stolen them). Several of them were Camelot comics, and as a budding history nerd, I loved anything historical. But in those stories, Guinevere didn't do anything but wait for all the other male characters to be her champion. The biggest choice she made was who to give a handkerchief to as a token.

As an extremely active and relatively athletic kid, this kind of everyday sexism was deeply annoying to me.

So I changed it. Instead of doing my homework, I photocopied the pages. Then I used the computer in the lab to re-type out a new story. Then I cut and glued the words so they fit into the speech bubbles. And I made Guinevere her own champion. She gives her token handkerchief to herself. I felt like she had the right to be the hero of her own story. I even re-photocopied my cut and paste pages and put them into the official binder so that anyone else that felt as I did— that Guinevere could tilt and joust like Lancelot and King Arthur could— read the story.

So first off— truly bless the educator who let me do this. If you're out there, Mrs. Sherry Glass, thank you forever.

I also spent my grad school years at the University of Chicago studying medieval Islamic art history. And my whole thesis, my whole focus of study was the ways in which we take these medieval stories and we make them a part of our national identity, about the stories we tell about ourselves.

And what has been so amazing to come back to these retellings— particularly in my case from a medieval legend like ROBIN HOOD— is that I feel like I've come full circle in such a beautiful way. Because now, we as a culture are really interested in examining what these stories mean to us. We're examining the ideas of a literary cannon and who decided what was important, all those years ago. We're examining the idea of who gets to tell a story and why that matters.

As a culture, these questions matter to us again in a really different way than they did, not just two hundred years ago, but even ten years ago. And that has been spectacular to see. And that make me feel like this is really the moment for these Reclaimed Classics.

2. Why are you pleased to be “reclaiming” the specific novel that you’re re-imagining— and what message or awareness do you hope your version will deliver to young readers that the original story did NOT?

I grew up on Disney's fox version of Robin Hood. I loved that story so much as a kid. I loved the gallantry and the adventure. I loved that Robin Hood wasn't the biggest or the strongest. Robin was the cleverest. I loved the idea that Robin Hood was this classically heroic and gallant archer who saved the day, largely on brains and charm.

I was a scrappy and tomboyish girl. I wasn't ever going to be the biggest and the strongest. But Robin made me feel like being the cleverest, the canniest, and being the most willing to not give up even when all seemed lost— that was what made you heroic.

But as I got older and I leaned more about the history of the crusades, the story of Robin Hood became increasingly complicated for me. I'm a Muslim woman and Robin has, since the nineteenth century, canonically been a Crusader. He's someone who is deeply invested in the status quo. He becomes invested for his fight to rob the rich to give to the poor because he wants his own ancestral lands back. In all the live-action versions that I grew up with— say, Robin Hood Men In Tights or that gloriously campy Kevin Costner Robin Hood— they tried to fix this by putting a token Muslim in Robin's crew.

Reader, this was not enough. Even ten year old me understood that.

So I hope that by reclaiming this story, by taking this medieval legend of a crusader and turning that into the story of a young Muslim woman who is fighting to protect her own homeland from invaders and her own region's fragile peace, I can also reclaim a piece of history. The medieval world was incredibly diverse and incredibly global. We all deserve to be able to see that.

I also hope that readers take away the variety of landscapes of what we call the Middle East. We think of deserts and the Arabian peninsula. We never think of the cedar forests of Lebanon. The mediterranean coastline of Syria. That it can snow in Amman and that there are areas of lush green near Salt. I hope readers take away the geographic diversity of a region that has often be depicted as desert and desert alone.

I also hope that my re-telling provides a much more inclusive vision of who Robin and her merry band can be. In making Robin a girl, I didn't want her to be the only girl on the team and I didn't want her to only be battling through sexism. I hope I can bring a level of complexity and inclusivity to the legend that, much like those Guinevere comics, I felt was lacking as a kid. I hope readers take away that they really can be the hero of their own adventures.