Animorphs #1 – 6
Adapted by: Chris Grine
Source material written by: K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant
Publisher: Scholastic
Animorphs by K.A. Applegate have returned with graphic novel adaptations by Chris Grine. The sixth in the series, The Capture, arrives at your local bookstore and/or public library on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. If you read the original prose books, the adaptations are an interesting way to revisit the cult classic series. And hopefully, a whole new generation of readers are discovering the seminal sci-fi story for themselves thanks to these new adaptations.
Animorphs
The Animorphs series debuted with The Invasion in June 1996. It was written under the byline K.A. Applegate, the pen name for wife-and-husband writing team Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, and later, a team of ghostwriters. Volumes in the mainline series was released on a near-monthly basis, concluding with the 54th entry, The Beginning, in May 2001. Along the way, several spinoff miniseries were released, including four “… Chronicles” books, Megamorphs and Alternamorphs.
The story followed five human teenagers: Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias and Marco. In The Invasion, the quintet of teens encountered a fatally wounded alien on their walk home from the mall. This alien, Elfangor the Andalite, revealed that the Earth was being clandestinely invaded by other aliens: the Yeerks.
Yeerks are slug-like parasitic creatures. In order to survive away from their “Yeerk pools,” they must crawl into the ear of another species and take control of their bodies. There’s a slight catch: every three days, they must return to the Yeerk pool and recharge with special radiation. But thanks to “The Sharing,” an organization masquerading as a sort of community-based charity/social club, they’ve managed to take control of many humans already, including many authority figures. Essentially, anyone might be a “human-controller,” or a host under the control of a Yeerk.
In order to give humanity a fighting chance against the infiltration, Elfangor gives the five teens the ability to “morph.” By touching any living creature and “acquiring” its DNA, the teens can “morph” into a duplicate of that creature for up to two hours. But holding any morph for more than the two-hour limit will render the morpher a “nothlit”: they’ll lose the ability to transform themselves and be forever trapped in whatever form they had adopted when the two-hour limit expired.
The Animorphs Formula
In terms of format, the Animorphs series had a special hook. Each of the main series books was told from the first person perspective of one of the five teens (and later, the sixth member of the Animorphs team, Aximili). From volume to volume, the narrator would alternate.
The books earned a reputation for not shying away from disturbing body horror, creepy sci-fi consequences and outright brutal violence. For one thing, the in-text process of morphing was not the smooth transition depicted by the books’ covers. Instead, it was a bone-cracking, Cronenberg-esque mutation that could be unpredictable and grotesque. Meanwhile, the battles the Animorphs undertook against the Yeerks could be extremely messy. By the end of the series, the surviving characters have been scarred by the lengths to which they had to go in the process of wrestling control of the Earth back from the invaders.
Even if you didn’t read the books, if you were visiting book stores, libraries or Scholastic book fairs in the late 90s, you probably remember seeing them. This is thanks to the original series’ aforementioned arresting covers. These depict the protagonists “morphing” into various animal forms. The cover art for The Invasion was by Peter Bollinger and the cover art for the second book, The Visitor, was by Tim O’Brien. However the remaining 52 main series books and the four Megamorphs books feature cover art by David Mattingly.
The face of the final stage of the morph was cut-out: when you opened the cover, it revealed a full-color image of the animal morph in action. And that wasn’t the only carryover within the interior from the cover. On the bottom corner of each page was a sequential image of the POV character morphing. This made every Animorphs volume a flipbook.
In Comics Form
With the October 2020 release of the first Animorphs adaptation by Grine, the series entered the comics sphere. As far as adaptations go, these have been fairly close to the source material. Just like the original series, each volume of the comic is narrated by one of the teens. And so far, each comic has corresponded directly with their prose counterpart in title, plot and perspective. Furthermore, all six of the Animorphs comics published so far have been adapted by Grine.
Because the adaptations are generally faithful, they are immediately engaging, just like the prose books. The Animorphs story, characters and mythology have been key elements of the enduring cult following the franchise has enjoyed. And all those elements have been pretty closely reproduced in these adaptations. For that reason, these comics will serve as either a nice way to be introduced to the story, or a nice way to revisit the story in a different form.
Grine’s artwork works especially well with regard to certain aspects of the story. He is adept at drawing the various species of aliens, as well as their spaceships and technology. The various species of animals are all instantly recognizable, including the not-inconsiderable number of insect morphs the teens try out in these early volumes.
And there is another aspect of the artwork in which Grine is especially talented. Unlike the smooth shift depicted by the original series covers, in the comics art, the process of morphing is shown to be the gnarly experience described by the prose. This includes bone-cracking, organ-shifting sound effects.
The Capture
The sixth entry in the Animorphs graphic novel adaptation series, The Capture, returns to Jake’s perspective. Like the previous five entries, this volume makes great use of colored word balloons. By assigning each of the Animorphs their own color, it becomes possible to distinguish who is speaking telepathically while in morph.
This volume sees Jake, the de facto leader of the team, falling into a Yeerk pool and becoming a Controller himself. It includes multiple insect morphs, as well as a variety of the team’s “battle morphs.” The process of morphing into flies is particularly disturbing. The Capture also utilizes the sci-fi trope of having two versions of the same character come face-to-face with themselves in the mindscape.
The Capture is the sixth Animorphs adaptation by Grine. In a post made to Bluesky, he stated that the future of the comics adaptations are currently unclear. Meanwhile, in a May 2010 interview, Grine said that he wanted to adapt the first ten books.
Whatever the case moving forward, the Animorphs graphic novel adaptations should continue. There is so much potential in comic adaptations of the remaining mainline novels and tie-in stories. Adaptations of books like The Andalite Chronicles could be fantastic, and it might be nice to see multiple artists tackle the longer Megamorphs stories, which contain the perspective of all six protagonists. Whether you’re a longtime fan of the series or are curious to experience the story for the first time, the Animorphs graphic novels are worth your while.
Animorphs #1 through 6 are available at your local bookstore and/or public library
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