Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 29 Mar 2018

Can great novels ever survive the transition to a graphic format?

A little while ago I thought I should try to come to some kind of accommodation with the genre usually described as graphic novels. I’d read plenty of articles about how they had ‘come of age’ and were no longer only the recourse for bed-sit-bound young men and teenagers obsessed with superheroes but now handled substantial issues in an original way. At this point someone will always drop the name of Art Spiegelman and his extraordinary Maus or the works of Alan Moore, the creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta.

As if responding to this upsurge in interest in the graphic format, bookshops like Waterstones have created dedicated sections for them which have continued to grow in size. Browsing the shelves it soon becomes clear that there is quite a significant distinction to be made between the fantasy/comic book graphic output and those that have a claim to be ‘novels’ dealing with complex social and political issues – I have been impressed by Epileptic and Persepolis that are original perspectives on pressing issues.

Having said that these publications are impressive is not quite the same as saying I enjoyed them or that I found them particularly easy to read. But then I started spotting examples of classic novels that had been adapted into the graphic format and I decided that I should take a closer look at a sample of these.

I think the important starting point for any exploration of these graphic novel adaptations is to realise two important things: firstly, the graphic novel isn’t just the original novel with illustrations, it is a completely different approach. Secondly, there’s no ‘right’ or uniform template that graphic novels have to follow; in simple words, they’re all different.

I started with Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz’s treatment of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In this example, Mairowitz has reduced the text, mostly in dialogue form, to an absolute minimum and thereby allowing Anyango’s drawings to do most of the work. The aim seems to be to retain the atmosphere and spirit of Conrad’s work rather than the writing. Anyango is a graduate of Central St. Martins and the Royal College of Art and her fascination with the art of cinema is really clear to see. She eschews the use of colour in favour of an almost muddy ink wash where light and dark work together to create impact.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita adapted into a graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal takes a very different approach and goes for a much more traditional comic storyboard format where black and white mixes with colour and the words used are all dialogue. Interestingly, Klimowski is primarily an art poster artist and that set of skills are very easy to see in the way he frames his work in a very orderly way – there’s none of the all-page bleeds we see in the Anyango and Mairowitz example – and the story progresses frame by frame as if it were a running illustration of a movie. The overall impact is much more simple, even naïve, and I was far less comfortable with this that with The Heart of Darkness.

I then picked up a much more sumptuous example – Martin Rowson’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman  by Laurence Sterne. Rowson will be someone better known to many readers because of his political cartooning work in newspapers and books and this probably accounts for why the publishers have pushed out the boat on the publication values of this book – and it really pays dividends. Sterne’s classic is, of course, famously experimental, non-linear and multi-dimensional and so it would be quite hard for Rowson to do anything that wouldn’t fit into the spirit of the original text. Sterne was also a satirist of real quality and so his text is excellent source material for a social commentator like Rowson who sees parallels between Sterne’s 18th century world and 21st century England. This is an artist working in partnership with the original and creating something that stands alongside the classic and adds to it.

Staying with Rowson, his Gulliver’s Travels is explicit that this is ‘adapted and updated’ by the illustrator. And so here we see Swift’s original acting much more as the inspiration for an original work than an adaptation that is meant to be in anyway faithful to the original. This is political satire at its most coruscating and, in my book, a perfect use of the graphic novel format.

So, can the graphic novel successfully reimagine our classic literary texts? Well, I guess the answer is yes and no. What they certainly can’t do is in any way ‘faithfully’ recast the original – the closer the graphic novel tries to parallel the original, the less convincing it is. The more risks the graphic novel takes, the more it is prepared to use the original as a starting point rather than the end in itself, the more interesting they are.

But, honestly, I’m not convinced they’re for me in the long term – ultimately I’m happier with words than pictures because I’m happy to create my own images in my head and the words are, after all, what made the book great in the first place.

 

Terry Potter

March 2018