I hadn’t read the Graphic Classics version (I didn’t want to copy them, consciously or unconsciously, so I avoided both their version and the old Errol Flynn movie), so I’m a bit surprised that we started in the same place. On my end, though, there were a few dramatic/story reasons for doing it. The chief one was that while there’s lots of expository text in the first hundred pages of the novel, not much happens — Blood tends garden, rides to help a sick man, gets arrested, has a trial and is sent to the West Indes as a slave. And it’s all excellently written, and works well in novel format, but starting the comic off with a heady bang — Blood at the lowest rung, and then an explanation of how he got there — gives you a bit more of a hook to start the story on. There’s a kind of compression I find works well in flashback scenes, SINCE they’re already framed as a flashback, that gives me latitude to kind of hop through the long bits of exposition at the start of the novel (which includes a fascinating but not-really-comics-adaptable Coles Notes version of the Monmouth rebellion). Were I to start the comic there and roll forward naturally, I think it would have seemed choppy and awkward, but in the flashback format I can squeeze in all that backstory while still having loads of space for the big escape and battles scenes.

Mileage obviously varies, and it may have been a ham-handed way of handling the pacing, but I just wanted to explain the reason behind the choice. Thanks again for reading!