Hollow City: The Graphic Novel

Overview

Hollow City: The Graphic Novel picks up in the immediate aftermath of a monstrous attack, following Jacob Portman and his fellow peculiar children as they drift at sea without a clear way home. Their guardian and headmistress, Miss Peregrine, remains trapped in the form of a bird, unable to change back, which leaves the group both leaderless and racing against time.

The search for a cure sends the children toward London, where the visual adaptation leans on artist Cassandra Jean's linework alongside the series' signature use of antique found photographs. That pairing of illustration and archival imagery, carried over from Ransom Riggs's prose novels, gives the graphic novel a distinct look that blends contemporary comic art with a haunted, historical texture.

As in the original book, danger trails the children at every stop, and the adaptation compresses a sprawling fantasy plot into a visually driven format aimed at readers who already know the world of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children as well as newcomers drawn in through comics.

A Series Built on Photography and Peril

What sets the Miss Peregrine franchise apart from other YA fantasy is its origin in real vintage photographs, oddities that Riggs collected and wove into a mythology explaining why the children in them look so strange. The graphic novel format pushes that idea further, placing hand-drawn characters directly alongside those found images rather than simply describing them in prose. This second installment also marks a turning point in the series' tone: the safety of the loop the children called home is gone, and the narrative shifts into a chase across a wartime landscape, raising the stakes and the body count of monstrous threats considerably compared to the first book.

The adaptation sits within a broader trend of popular YA prose series being reissued as graphic novels, a format shift that has introduced titles like this one to school and classroom library shelves as much through their visual appeal as their existing fan base.

Why Hollow City Has Been Challenged

Objections to this title generally track the same concerns raised about the broader Miss Peregrine series: violent and frightening imagery involving monsters that stalk and consume the peculiar children, along with wartime peril that some reviewers consider intense for younger middle-grade readers. Because the story is rendered in comic-panel form, illustrated depictions of danger and threat are more immediately visible on the page than they would be in text alone, which has fed some of the concern from challengers evaluating it for shelf placement. Other objections echo standard fantasy-genre pushback, centering on age-appropriateness for school libraries rather than any single explicit scene. In this catalog, the title has been challenged in 2 states and 2 districts.