This comes in the wake of the launch of the Marvel Illustrated line (Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island, The Man in the Iron Mask) and SelfMadeHero’s Manga Shakespeare range (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet). In recent years, there has been a trickle of literary adaptations, mostly in the Graphic Classics range, but also including Richard Corben’s Poe adaptations and Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy’s version of Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Now we have a river forming.
My own expectations of literary adaptations like this aren’t great. It is all to easy to lose what made them special in their original medium without finding an equivalent in the new one. But adapters who avoid producing second-rate copies can end up offending fans of the original by changing what those fans valued. It’s hard to win this game.
My favourite adaptations of prose, poetry and plays into comics are those which take an oblique approach, rather than trying simply to reproduce their source.
Martin Rowson’s adaptation of T S Eliot’s great modernist poem The Waste Land recasts it as a Chandleresque private-eye story, throwing in lots of jokes and occasional insights into the nature of modern art (and film noir).
Hunt Emerson has produced several literary adaptations, including D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and part of Casanova’s memoirs (as Casanova’s Last Stand). These turn the originals into out-and-out comedies. Emerson’s most successful work in this vein, his version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, retains the entire text of the original poem, but surrounds it with cartoon mayhem. It’s a bit like watching Shirley Bassey maintaining her deadpan composure while Morecambe and Wise cause chaos behind her.
You’d have thought that this approach would annoy fans of the original poem. But apparently Emerson’s version sells well at the shop attached to the Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere, dedicated to the lake poets. They'll even sell you an “I shot the albatross” T-shirt using one of his panels.
Panels
Artwork for a page from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, adapted by Amy Cozine (script) and John M Burns (art), Classical Comics, due 2008, taken from the Classical Comics website
The Waste Land by Martin Rowson, Penguin Books, 1990
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, comics adaptation by Hunt Emerson, colour by Carol Bennett, Knockabout Books, 1989
4 comments:
Being a bookseller and general read-head I do have a cynical side of me that thinks, oh what are these for, go read the proper book. But I also know a lot of folks, especially boys, won't read the book, so sometimes this is a way to get them reading and sometimes, just sometimes, it makes them curious to try the actual prose version too, which can't be a bad thing.
I swear I had a Classics Illustrated-style adaptation of Last of the Mohicans as a kid, that kinda glossed over, oh, all the death at the end. It was like it was missing pages: the story's going along, and then bam! One Mohican left, he's the last, the end. Took me years to figure it out.
Vince Fago, one-time EIC of Timely, published a series of "Illustrated Classics" (not to be confused with "Classics Illustrated") in the 1970s They were hard-cover, 64-page adaptations in the same vein as the ones you mention, Steve. (Curious, though, that they were all typeset instead of hand-lettered.) I had some of these as a kid, and I can say first-hand that they did indeed springboard me into several of the originals.
I've also found that some of the imagry carries through with me to this very day. Fago's Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is what I consider the "definitive" version with regard to visuals.
a series of "Illustrated Classics" (not to be confused with "Classics Illustrated")
Now, why do I suspect that Vince Fago hoped that they would be confused with "Classics Illustrated"? (Cynic that I am!)
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