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The Radical Brontës festival takes place across Bradford this September with art, drama, films and even a Brontë 'Burlesque', not to mention talks and discussions about the books themselves. In the words of the woman behind the idea, Bradford writer Joolz Denby: "The Brontës were genuine social revolutionaries; their true story deserves to be re-examined and given back to the people. They are inspirational." The new graphic novel has been commissioned to do just this.

Adam, asked how he feelsÌýabout 'adapting' this world-famous and much-loved novel, stresses while he may have reduced 288 pages to around 50, he has not rewritten the novel: "I've concentrated on the drive of the story which is what I think you have to do in a graphic novel. It's quite a complicated theme. There's a couple of things which I've tried to move along more quickly. There's a few splats and whacks in it as there are in the original novel. There's quite an undercurrent of sex and overcurrent of violence. I guess Emily Brontë's world in Haworth was mean and violent in many ways. The Brontës were living in a time of widespreadÌýdeath and poverty and they couldn't escape that in the Parsonage."

Despite its complicated themes Adam thinks Wuthering Heights has all the ingredients for a good graphic novel: "It's got set piece after set piece and there's a passionate love story at the centre of it. It's full of incident, it's full of landscape, it's full of really clearly contrasting characters. It's full of love and cruelty as well."

A Wuthering Heights for our time?

But a graphic novel is about much more than words. Surprisingly Adam has yet to meet his collaborator and graphic artist Siku - the whole thing has been put together by email. We asked Adam what came first, words or pictures: "Emily Brontë came first. I had to write the storyboard frame by frame which is, in a sense, the easy part. It was a much bigger job for Siku than it was for me, drawing each frame. Then it came back to me so I could work out what each speech and narrative bubble should say. That's when it became a bit fiddly with lots of going backwards and forwards and editing."

Siku is one of the country's leading graphic artists, having worked for 2000AD, Marvel and COM X. Adam comments: "His style is quite flowing. It's not hard-edged like some graphic artists and I think that's quite suited to Wuthering Heights.

"But Wuthering Heights is not fun. What I've done, and what Siku has done more then me, is to make it immediately accessible to young people. It is a convoluted story with many, many changes of situations and generations and I think it's quite difficult when you first read it. Hopefully it will bring some people to the novel and hopefully people who already know it will enjoy the graphic novel for what it is which is essentially bringing it to life in images. It's not a substitute at all for reading the book. It's still 50 pages of a graphic novel and perhaps people who read those will also come to Wuthering Heights. You could see it in a way as a film treatment - it's a series of visual images with words but words are not the primary thing in the graphic novel. I was brought into the project essentially as a script writer and the process is the same. You are writing a series of action frames which is what the graphic novel is."

Hot off the press: Adam takes his first look...

But Adam feels he was also given the commission because of his passion for the original book: "I love it and I think that's why I was asked to do it. I think it's a very poetic novel and it's a novel that's rooted in the Yorkshire landscape. It's a novel of extremes and I've written a lot about extremes in behaviour and experience in the contemporary world in Yorkshire. I love the novel because of the things it picks up in me and my experience of living and working in Yorkshire and the other things I write about which are landscapes and people in extreme situations."

In the past Adam has worked with asylum seekers, Bengalis and travellers, helping them tell their stories. Has the idea of Heathcliff as an outsider influenced his approach to the novel? Adam believes he and Siku have presented their readers with a Heathcliff and Cathy for our time: "When Heathcliff arrives at the house he's referred to as being dark. In the book he's called a gypsy brat by the other children and servants. The way he's been drawn by Siku it's fairly obvious he does look different to the other characters. Cathy in the graphic novel is not perhaps the way we imagine her from Emily's book. She is slightly older, slightly more sexy and I guess she hasn't been starved in a way a young person living at Wuthering Heights would have been at the time Emily was writing."

Wuthering Heights as seen by Siku

In the novel Heathcliff is described as a Lascar [a name used for Asian seamen at the time of the Brontës]. Adam says: "Emily would have known gypsies and might have come across Lascars on her few visits out and, as we know, she was very widely read but it all comes from the incredible imagination she had.Ìý That's what still holds up because so few writers have the power to imagine such a world from the resources they have in their head."

But Adam still sees Emily's world as firmly set on the moors around Haworth: "It's rooted in life at that time, and very much rooted in the stones and moors and the mixture of people from Joseph the servant who speaks broad dialect to Heathcliff." He reads to us from Charlotte's introduction to her sister's novel which she says readers may think a "rude and strange production." She adds: "It is moorish and wild and knotty as the root of heath."

Adam agrees: "It is knotty. It's a knotty plot with knotty difficult characters, and we live in knotty difficult times I guess, and that's why it works now, coming out of that landscape. Charlotte says, 'Her native hills were far more to her than a spectacle. They were what she lived in and by' and it's that relationship between landscape and character which is so powerful. She manages to bring them together and merge them in and out of each other as we've done in the graphic novel with action figures and the ghosts emerging out of the landscape and people, alive and dead, as they were in Haworth graveyard, being around you all the time as they were for Emily. I hope that's what we've done in the graphic novel."