Super Adaptoids

Both Down the Tubes and the Forbidden Planet International Blog carry the news of a new imprint, Classical Comics, which will be publishing comic strip versions of classic works of literature, starting with Henry V, Macbeth, Jane Eyre and Great Expectations.



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

Buck Rogers in the Workers’ Paradise

The Look-In Picture Strip Archive is a splendid enterprise aimed at collecting the comic strips that appeared in the so-called “Junior TV Times” in the 1970s and 1980s. Look-In was a mix of strips and articles, the former mostly based on TV series that appealed to boys (though I do remember a strip based on Follyfoot Farm), the latter being generally about pop groups who appealed to what we would now call “tween” girls.

Some of the comic strips were in black and white, but others were full-colour, printed on good quality paper in the photogravure tradition of Eagle, TV21 and Countdown. Look-In would be the last comic produced this way until new technology drastically reduced printing costs.

The Look-In Picture Strip Archive contains prime comics work by John M Burns, Mike Noble, Arthur Ranson, Martin Asbury and Jim Baikie. So far it only covers examples from Sapphire & Steel, Space:1999, The Tomorrow People and Terrahawks, but the archive now has a complete run of Look-In’s adapatation of the TV version of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Given that there were only two pages a week to play with, the stories, by Angus P Allan, were inevitably crude and the characterisation perfunctory, but in this case that was a good match with the TV show. The art, by Asbury, Ransom and Noble, was mouth-watering. Here is a sample page by Ransom (as ever, click to enlarge). The archive pages are bigger, being 300 dpi scans.



One thing always struck me about the TV series. It was fairly clear that the Earth of the 25th century was a totalitarian state. It was ruled by an oligarchic council of computers. Press blackouts of emergencies were commonplace. Food was provided by a food directorate, energy by an energy directorate. All trade had to pass through a strictly policed narrow corridor through the planet’s force field. We saw no independent economic or political activity on Earth. Buck had no job – he turned down employment by the defense directorate – but he still had an apartment, clothes, food and a robot servant, so either there was a generous welfare state or, more likely, senior apparatchiks like Wilma and Dr Huer could work the system to provide for their toy-boy.

And what did Buck do? He tried to teach people to boogie and play table tennis, albeit not at the same time. Wouldn’t Jim Kirk have overthrown this society in, oh, about 45 minutes?