Where Cinema Failed, Comics Succeeded – A Review of Albert Monteys’ Adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’

Published in 1980, A Confederacy of Dunces had a particular road to existence. Toole’s mother discovered a copy of the manuscript after his death and eventually pestered Walker Percy into reading the darn thing, but it has since been heralded as one of the canonical pieces of Southern United States literature. However, my particular high school English classes never covered this particular book, so when I was asked to read Albert Monteys’ graphic novel adaptation, I first had to do research, and research uncovered a very peculiar fact: so many people had tried to adapt this novel to film and so many famous actors were attached to play the protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly and absolutely none of them came to pass. Two years after publication, a pre-Ghostbusters/Groundhog Day Harold Ramis took a stab at it with John Belushi, but then Belushi died. John Candy was attached momentarily. Then Jonathan Waters, and Stephen Fry, and Chris Farley, and John Goodman, and Will Farrell. During all of this, the rights bounced from Ramis to an old magnate to Steven Soderbergh, who flat out called the project cursed in 2013. As such, the only successful adaptation of the novel was a 2015 theater production with Nick Offerman. At least until 2026, where Albert Monteys has managed to adapt the un-adaptable yet again.

I say again because six years ago, I saw Ryan North and Albert Monteys manage to take on the incredibly difficult task of converting Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which was a…