As performers, composers, creative directors and a vast swath of technical artists awaited their fate in the coronavirus pandemic, one scrappy company in San Francisco, Opera Parallèle, decided to pursue an idea that creative director Brian Staufenbiel had been mulling over since 2013. That idea became Opera Parallèle’s production of “Everest – A Graphic Novel Opera.” The original “Everest,” a one-act opera by Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer, debuted in a traditional live performance at the Dallas Opera in 2015. Following the story of Rob Hall and the fellow climbers who died on Mount Everest in a 1996 disaster, the opera is based on the 1997 bestselling nonfiction book “Into Thin Air” by journalist Jon Krakauer. What sets Opera Parallèle’s 2021 production of Talbot and Scheer’s opera apart is the form; thanks to the illustrations of Mark Simmons and photography directed by multidisciplinary projection designer and film director David Murakami, “Everest” unfolds, literally, as a graphic novel.