Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Is Now a Graphic Novel (Exclusive)

Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis has been reimagined into a graphic novel.

Adapted by writer Chris Ryall and Eisner-winning artist Jacob Phillips, the 160-page graphic novel offers readers an immersive new look at Coppola’s iconic cinematic story.

Ahead of its release on Tuesday, Oct 7, PEOPLE has an exclusive first look at some of the graphic novels’ pages.

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!

Phillips tells PEOPLE in an exclusive statement that “the aim was to establish the world and the characters that inhabit it in these opening pages. We get the cast and what each individual is about, the unbalanced world that they live in and the new miracle building material set to fix it.”

“We are also setting up the visual tone of the book, the golden hues and grainy washes working both with and against each other,” he said.

Ryall shares in an exclusive statement that the “opening title sequence” presented “various scenes of the world of New Rome and all its class struggles.”

“This scene was the introduction of the lead characters in the story, namely its chief antagonist, Mayor Cicero, and our complicated hero, Cesar Catalina, along with the mayor’s daughter Julia, whose character perhaps saw the most pronounced change from beginning to end,” said Ryall.

However, the writer tells PEOPLE that the graphic novel purposely doesn’t “try to replicate the scenes from the film with any specificity,” noting that they purposely avoided using the film as a starting point.

“Francis wanted this to stand on its own — as did we — so it was fun after the fact to see how close Jacob got in so many instances,” says Ryall.

While Phillips had images of the sets from the movie as well as some concept designs, which he said were “incredibly helpful for me to envisage what was written on the page,” he only used them as a jumping-off point.

“It was just enough to get me going but not enough to limit what we wanted to do with the book,” says Phillips.

Ryall explains that he “at least had the luxury of being on set for some of the shoot, and seeing various assembled rough cuts along the way. Jacob, in England, had only my graphic novel script to work from.”

Because of this, Ryall says that the graphic novel “became very much its own thing and not any kind of straight adaptation.”

“I finally saw the film when it was released in cinemas, just like everybody else,” Phillips tells PEOPLE. “And honestly, it was a surreal experience for me seeing these things I’d spent the last year or more drawing on the big screen. It was so interesting to see which points were similar and where it diverge.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

Megalopolis arrives on bookshelves Tuesday, Oct. 7, and is available for preorder now wherever books are sold.