Classics Emulated: Comic Adaptations of Literary Texts

Author(s): Frank Erik Pointner and Sandra Eva Boschenhoff

Source: CEA Critic , SPRING-SUMMER 2010, Vol. 72, No. 3, A Special Issue: The Graphic
Novel (SPRING-SUMMER 2010), pp. 86-106
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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86

Frank Erik Pointner and Sandra Eva Boschenhoff

Classics Emulated: Comic Adaptations of Literary Tex

The twentieth century witnessed the greatest innovations in

media since Gutenberg invented book printing 500 years earlier.1
printing technology for the first time made possible the vast distri
pictures and images in newspapers, magazines, fashion catalogues,
billboards. Moving pictures, in the cinema or on television, st
engage people's leisure time at least as much as books had ever don
recently, the internet favours the picture over the word with incre
quency. Varnum and Gibbons do not exaggerate when they propou

The balance of power between words and images . . . seems

now to be shifting in favour of the image. Whether on tele-
vision, in the movies, on the pages of newspapers and mag-
azines, on computer screens, in advertising, or in comics,
images clamor for public attention. (Varnum & Gibbons ix)

If we are willing to grant that images have recently been gaining

against the (written) word, we might support this claim by pointin
numerous adaptations of word-based texts to visual media. Con
ever-growing industry of literary films. With each passing year, it
new Jane Austen movie appears, the great Victorian novelists are a
the agenda, and what would Hollywood do without Malory's King
There has also been a tendency to turn modern popular novels int
pictures as soon as their sales figures exceed a certain number, in
novels which are hardly suitable for filmic adaptation, such as the
these , The Da Vinci Code , by Dan Brown. Television hardly falls short
in its application of prose texts, and the internet will certainly play
part in the ever-growing industry of intermedial adaptations of th
word. However, scholarly discourse still largely neglects comics b
literary sources. Thus, the editors of Intermedialities define their subje
ter as follows: "Intermedialities stand for the thematic and/ or form
between individual art forms (literature, music, painting, photog
film, television, the internet etc.)- 'interart relations' would be a
obsolete synonym" (Huber 1).
The absence of comics as one of the most popular "art forms"
above canon is conspicuous, but hardly surprising. How should we
thorough investigations into comic adaptations of other art forms,
all novels, if the comic does not figure prominently in scholarly d

The CEA Critic 72.3 (Spring-Summer 2010)

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 Critic 72.3 87

Will Eisner's statement, though already twenty-five years old, still largely
holds true:

For reasons having much to do with usage and subject mat-

ter Sequential Art has been generally ignored as a form
worthy of scholarly discussion. While each of the major
integral elements, such as design, drawing, caricature and
writing, have separately found academic consideration,
this unique combination has received a very minor place (if
any) in either the literary or art curriculum. I believe that
the reason for this sits as much on the shoulders of the prac-
titioner as the critic. ( Comics and Sequential Art 5)

Although a significant contribution to comic studies has been made in the

quarter of the century since Eisner complained about its utter neglect- fore-
most Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics , which has gained almost
Biblical status- the number of these publications is only a fraction of those
concerning themselves with film. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that
the majority of the essays in Intermedialities treat "the thematic and/or for-
mal links between" film and other narrative genres excepting comics and
including popular music. A welcome exception to this rule of ignoring
comics in intermedial analyses is the anthology Film and Comic Books
(Gordon et al. 2007) which collects fourteen scholarly essays concerning
themselves with filmic adaptations of comics. Nevertheless, these essays
treat comics as the source medium, thus doing the opposite of what this
essay on comic adaptations of literary texts sets out to do.
We may assume that the growing interest in intermedial relations
between comics and film among academics is to some extent indebted to
successful motion pictures such as Spider-Man , Batman , Superman, X-Men,
and X-Men Origins : Wolverine. Such financial success can hardly be claimed
for comic adaptations of literary texts, although their number by far sur-
passes the number of films based on comic books. Considering that the edi-
tions of "literary comic books" seldom exceed a couple thousand copies,
they are hardly as visible in popular media as blockbusters like Watchmen
and The Spirit. Still, this phenomenon does not justify the general neglect of
comic adaptations of literary texts in academia. It is the objective of this
essay to narrow this gap.
Douglas Wölk, among the foremost connoisseurs of the comic book,
does not savour comics based on literary texts:

comics adaptations of prose books are almost uniformly

terrible, from the old Classics Illustrated pamphlets to the
contemporary versions of Black Beauty and The Hunchback of
Notre Dame ; they don't run on the same current, basically,
and they end up gutting the original work of a lot of its sig-
nificant content. (13)

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88 Pointner and Boschenhoff

Interestingly, the idea that comics "don't run on the same current [as liter-
ary texts]" and that they delete a lot of the source text's "significant content"
is also true for films based on literary texts. Nevertheless, few would
abruptly dismiss literary films as downright inferior. Indeed, films run on a
different current than do prose texts or comics. There is, first of all, the ques-
tion of reception: films are made to be collectively consumed in the cinema.
Consequently, they are meant to produce joint reactions in the audience
which create, at their best, what sociologists call "affective spaces." The
reading of a comic book on the other hand, is a solitary experience. Comics
are most often enjoyed privately rather than in unison or in a public space.
In addition, the reader of a comic, like the reader of any literary text, can
choose her own pace. She may take her time closely studying one image or
turn the pages back in order to reread a certain sequence. No such freedom
exists in public cinema, which has to be enjoyed at the pace of the filmmak-
ers. Similarly, on the production side of media there are more resemblances
between literary texts and comics than between literary texts and films. As
Pascal Lefèvre has it, "The creative part in film is done by a group of peo-
ple (writer, photographer, director, actor, editor, and the like), whereas
drawing and writing a comic can be done by a small team or just one per-
son" (Lefèvre 3).
Turning to the visual side, we have even more grounds to claim that
comics are closer to prose texts than to films. At least comics incorporate
written language that exists on a page and have to be read one after anoth-
er. In film, on the other hand, the voice of the protagonist is auditorily per-
ceived, with an actor's narration supported by sound effects and sound-
tracks. Most of all, however, films have to restrict themselves to a running
time between 90 and 150 minutes at most, thus streamlining to the point of
excluding much of the information a multi-hundred-paged novel contains.
Comics, especially graphic novels, are considerably less restrictive. If there
is a restriction- the old Classics Illustrated usually had forty-eight pages-
the artist may adjust the number of panels put on a page.
The current on which comics rim, to echo Wölk again, is a lot closer to
that of prose texts than that of films. Consequently, the deletion/addition
process is generally more spectacular when films are made from literary
sources than when the same sources are applied to compose comic books.
So why is it that literary comics take all the blame and literary films do not?
Literary comics do have their great artists, too.
The common dismissal of comics based on literary texts seems to lie
deep. Criticism of literary films generally "stresses the importance of seeing
each manifestation and each actualisation of a source or core text as a sepa-
rate work of art" (Seidl 38). Literature based comic books, on the other
hand, are generally judged with regard to the faithfulness of their render-
ing of "original" material, and, with this as the basis for their evaluation, the
genre cannot help but fall short. Consequently, in this essay we claim the

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 Critic 72.3 89

same right for literary comics as we claim for literary films. Let us judge
them according to their own standards and not their sources. There is noth-
ing to be added to Rocco Versaci' s pronouncement in the final chapter of his
book headlined "Illustrating the Classics":

It goes without saying that transferring a several-hundred-

page novel to a forty-eight-page comic book will necessar-
ily "distort." But I am less interested in making specific
comparisons between the source materials and their comic
book adaptations than I am in discussing how comic books
are positioned artistically in relation to that source materi-
al. That is, to what extent do the authors of comic book
adaptations make a space for comic books as important lit-
erary creations in their own right? (185)

This essay sets out to investigate what the comics medium can con-
tribute to the rendering and artistic interpretation of literary material and
less of what it cannot render truthfully. It propounds that we should treat
comics based on literary texts as emulations of their sources rather than
cheap illustrations, which unfortunately remains the chief approach of self-
appointed guardians of western civilization. Comics tell stories differently
than prose texts. This does not mean, however, that comics tell stories
worse. There are aspects to the act of storytelling that comics are better
equipped for than prose, and it thus seems reasonable to address the gulf
that separates written language and pictures in storytelling. Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing was among the first who systematically drew attention to
it: "If it be true that painting, in its imitation, makes use of entirely different
means and signs from those which poetry employs; the former employing
figures and colours in space, the latter articulate sounds in time" (339).
Lessing's concept of mimesis is untenable today. Nevertheless, his view
remains acceptable that space is the domain of painting, and that time is the
domain of written texts, which for him were mostly of a poetical nature.
Texts, being derivative of spoken language, are meant to be read one word
after the other and are thus the ideal medium to convey an action, particu-
larly if it involves a lot of movement which has a clear chronology- a per-
son walking, a car driving, two heroes fighting. Pictures, on the other
hand- Lessing has single paintings and not sequences in mind - may not
render the passage of time (at least before comics invented motion lines and
the whole array of other narrative devices). Lessing's dictum implies that
comics have an advantage over prose when it comes to the construction of
space.
In our reality, space is perceived at one glance; everybody who has
beheld a landscape from a hillock knows its immediate mind-boggling
effect. A prose text, however, has to describe scenery one element after the
other, constructing a chronology where there really is none. The ability of

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90 Pointner and Boschenhoff

Fig. 1. Will Eisner, The Contract with God Trilogy, 5. © 2006 by the Estate of Will Eisner. Used by
permission of W.W. Norton. All rights reserved.

pictures to depict wide-open spaces without having to revert to verbal

superlatives may be in part responsible for the popularity of westerns,
which invariably show boundless prairies, the horizon stretching to the sky
and often transcending the margins of the panel. Frank Miller's celebrated
300 is another case in point, since the magnificence of its construction of
space defies verbal description. Of course, the strength of space construc-
tion of the comic is not confined to natural sceneries. Hardly any superhero
comic can do without a configuration of vast "urban deserts," governed by
moral decay and corruption, where death and violence lurk at every corner.
Not only do pictures, paintings, photographs, and comic panels have an
advantage over prose texts when it comes to the construction of wide open
spaces, they also are able to convey immediacy unrivalled by prose when-
ever the subject's relationship to the space he or she inhabits is meaningful.

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 Critic 72.3 91

This is particularly the case in the pictorial representations of incarceration

scenes of gothic comics or, generally speaking, whenever the scene conveys
a sense of claustrophobia, with every single item seeming to suffocate the
subject. In these cases we may want to speak of an atmospheric setting , in
which the subject's own associations, whether negative or positive, are
reflected by the space surrounding him or her. The atmospheric space is
usually situated between polarities of bright/ dark, familiar/ strange,
safe/ threatening, ordered/ chaotic, beautiful/ ugly to name but a few. The
general atmosphere may be supported by weather phenomena such as fog,
rain, tempest, thunder storm, or sunshine. Will Eisner, for example, is the
master of atmospheric setting. When Frimme Hersh returns from his
daughter's funeral in the beginning of A Contract with God , the whole world
weeps with him. The caption of the first page-sized panel gives us the ver-

Fig. 2. Greg Rucka, Queen and Country, 119. © 2007 by Greg Rucka. Courtesy of Greg Rucka.

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92 Pointner and Boschenhoff

bal description: "All day the rain poured down on the Bronx without
mercy. The sewers overflowed and the waters rose over the curbs in the
street." Nothing can render Hersh's utter dejection better than the pictorial
representation of his surroundings: the deluge which correlates with his
sorrows, thus aggravating them.
Treating the outer world as a kind of "objective correlative" of the pro-
tagonist's inner world has a bearing on the narratological concept of inter-
nal focalization, which, following Genette, refers to stories or parts of sto-
ries that are told entirely from the perspective of one character (189). This
concept may easily be applied to comics. The very first panel of Greg
Rucka's magnificent spy comic Operation : Morningstar depicts the hustle
and bustle of a Kabul street scene. The mosque in the foreground directly
sets an oriental scene. Only men are seen in the street, all of them wearing
traditional attire. The only exception is the pedestrian in the foreground
whose dress, particularly his uncovered head, makes him stand out as a
westerner. The direct pictorial juxtaposition of the westerner and the Kabul
Muslims highlight their differences. This sense of otherness becomes
increasingly pronounced when we regard the westerner's unease, conveyed
by the perspiration on his back and his helpless effort to gain comfort by
drying his neck with a handkerchief. He obviously studies the spectacle in
front of him and the reader automatically sees the scene through his eyes.
We may say that the scene is internally focalised through him, highlighting
the otherness of the place and, to some extent, its oppressive atmosphere.
Generally speaking, pictures, and therefore comics, may have advan-
tages over prose texts when it comes to the construction of space. They may
render the general atmosphere much more immediately and thus influence
the way we are accustomed to perceive the world. This does not mean that
pictures or comics panels cannot render the way a character subjectively
perceives a place. Just like literary texts, pictures have internal focalisers
through which we perceive a scene. Moreover, in the depiction of different
phenotypical identities comics panels may be much more suggestive,
abstracting from the appearance of real life characters. Consequently, ethnic
and cultural stereotyping- not necessarily a bad thing- is inherent in the
system of comics; if stereotypical characters - the Afghans and the Brit - are
directly, synoptically juxtaposed, their different identities become even
more pronounced than in prose.
If we grant, as we have done above, that images have an advantage
over prose texts in the depiction of space, we may want to support this
claim by directly comparing prose and pictorial renderings of one and the
same place. Consequently, there are hardly any better renderings than
comics based on literary sources. In order to give substance to this claim we
would like to include three comic adaptations of literary texts that are based
on the three foremost narrative genres: short story, novel, and narrative
poetry.2 Let us start with Peter Kuper's magnificent version of Kafka's 1915
novella The Metamorphosis.

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 Critic 72.3 93

Fig. 3. Peter Kuper, front cover of The Metamorphosis adapted from Franz Kafka. © 2003 by
Peter Kuper. Courtesy of Peter Kuper.

Kuper' s work was published in 2003, featuring highly contrastive pan-

els and crudely drawn characters. The cover alone, with its awe-inspiring
depiction of the "monstrous vermin" (Kafka 3), leaves the reader no doubt
of what to expect. In order to achieve a rough xylographie (woodcut) effect,
Kuper employed blackened scratchboard from which he scraped off the ink,
since, generally speaking, xylography tends to confine the form finding of
an artist to rather crude delineations, which suits his project perfectly. The
characters and objects of the diegetic world are rendered in thick, angular
lines, interwoven with ramifications of thin hatchings. Kuper' s visual treat-
ment of Kafka's short story is characterised by its dark graphic backdrop
and raw appearance, thereby suggesting a visual equivalent of the
"Kafkaesque." Like the story, Kuper's comic begins in medias res, with its
protagonist Gregor Samsa finding himself transformed into a bug-like
insect. The story unfolds at a regular pace, while the reader is continually

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94 Pointner and Boschenhoff

Fig 4. Peter Kuper, The Metamorphosis , 8. © 2003 by Peter Kuper. Courtesy of Peter Kuper.

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 Critic 72.3 95

torn between the fantastic occurrences past all belief and the detached style
of the narration. While Kuper had to abbreviate the translated text of the
original he followed Kafka's storyline very closely and did not notably
change the text.
Since the major part of the story concentrates on Gregor's internal
struggles and welling sentiments, the crude style of the comic corresponds
to his perception of his environment. The very first panel depicting Gregor
and his surroundings after his metamorphosis is formed like a vision
through a magnifying glass and overlaps the main, one-sided panel. He
appears to be the focus of a camera eye through the panel's extraordinary
form, which frames and captures him. Bug Gregor is shown half-awake
lying on his back in his bed. The large panel gives an overview of his room
which seems crammed with furniture, dark and suffocating. The whole
atmosphere is oppressive and bleak. In comparison to later panoramic shots
of Gregor's room, the reader can factually deduce that this first representa-
tion is in no way naturalistic, but purely claustrophobic. The bed is posi-
tioned too closely to the double-winged door on the left, thus engendering
a perspective contortion that is anything but a mimetic representation of
reality. Gregor, lying in the foreground of the panel, has a similar function
as the romantic rear-view figure that leads the reader's eyes and makes
identification with the character possible. The whole room is perceived
through the bug's eyes. Thus, Gregor functions as the internal focaliser.
Kuper pools all important objects described by the narrator in Kafka's text
in one single panel, which the reader is allowed to take in at one glance,
whereas Kafka's narrator, bound to the conventions of prose, needs to
expound on all the details in Gregor's room consecutively:

"What's happened to me?" he thought. It was no

dream. His room, a regular human room, only a little on
the small side, lay quiet between the four familiar walls.
Over the table, on which an unpacked line of fabric sam-
ples was all spread out- Samsa was a travelling sales-
man-hung the picture which he had recently cut out of a
glossy magazine and lodged in a pretty gilt frame. It
showed a lady done up in a fur hat and a fur boa, sitting
upright and raising up against the viewer a heavy fur muff
in which her whole forearm had disappeared.
Gregor's eyes then turned to the window, and the over-
cast weather- he could hear raindrops hitting against the
metal window ledge- completely depressed him. (Kafka 3)

Almost all details of the text also appear in the panel, but here they are
represented synoptically and other points of emphasis have been chosen.
The minutely described portrait of the lady with the fur muff is clearly dis-
tinguishable in Kuper's vision, yet the artist chooses to highlight objects

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96 Pointner and Boschenhoff

which purport the oppressive gloominess of the room. The alarm clock on
Gregor's bedside table attains a dominant central position, oversized and
threatening, its bells sounding mechanically with a little hammer. The suit-
case Gregor uses for work is crammed with his merchandise and one has
the impression that it will never close again, foreshadowing what is indeed
to come: Gregor will never again leave his abode, let alone use his suitcase.
The key in the lock is turned and Gregor is not only mentally but also phys-
ically locked in, thus adding a visual dimension to the overall claustropho-
bic atmosphere. Everything in the panel makes one want to escape and so
one's eyes tend to wander upwards toward the domed ceiling, searching for
an egress. However, there is nowhere to flee, only unfathomable darkness.
The only window in the room is, of course, closed, and heavy rain can be
discerned through the glass. It takes some time to 'read' every detail of the
panel, even though the overall atmosphere is clear at first glance. This
immediacy of Kuper's rendering also has its drawbacks: a text is consider-
ably more suitable for allowing one to uniquely envision a story's setting
and characters. For some readers, tension and horror might be expressed
more vividly and threateningly in a written text. Through its direct depic-
tion, a picture supersedes this creative process of imaginative visualisation;
on the other side of the coin, it serves as a substitute for the descriptive text
in comics and thus shows the artist's visual interpretation. His emotive
vision of the barren room even manages to invoke a sense of Gregor's inner
turmoil because it is openly reflected in his surroundings.

Fig. 5. Peter Kuper, The Metamorphosis, 9. © 2003 by Peter Kuper. Courtesy of Peter Kuper.

In another scene the narrator describes Gregor's desperate attempt to

fall back to sleep, which is absolutely impossible because his mobility is
determined by his bug-like physiology: he simply cannot turn onto his
favourite side. "No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side,
he always rocked onto his back again. He must have tried it a hundred
times, closing his eyes so as not to have to see his squirming legs, and
stopped only when he began to feel a slight, dull pain in his side, which he
had never felt before" (3).

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 Critic 72.3 97

In the comic this sequence of events, namely Gregor7 s constant twisting

motions, has been translated into a succession of multiple panels. The uni-
form panel sizes and forms bestow a certain rhythm to Gregor' s futile
attempts. Furthermore, the frames are rather constricting, thus giving the
impression that Gregor is not only limited by his clumsy, insect-like body,
but also by the room around him, symbolised by the panel. The wild motion
is emphasised by a number of direction lines inside the panels, illustrating
which way Gregor is trying to move. In Kuper7 s absorbing visuals the char-
acter's desperation, his frantic rolling, and the futility of the whole situation
become almost tangible. Motion lines and drops of sweat emanate from
Gregor to indicate that his body is indeed aching from the exertion. No
speech balloons or captions are needed to describe the ongoing action: the
eight small panels tell the story all by themselves. The reading order of
those panels adheres to the same conventions as written words in English:
they are read from left to right. The panels are consequently read like stan-

Fig. 6. Peter Kuper, The Metamorphosis, 30. © 2003 by Peter Kuper. Courtesy of Peter Kuper.

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98 Pointner and Boschenhoff

dard literature and, therefore, need to be deciphered just like written words,
which are also merely symbols of what they actually denote.
A passage brilliantly mastered by Kuper is Gregor' s waking up in his
room after his father's first violent assault upon him. Kafka's Gregor is sim-
ply idly listening and watching from his immobile position somewhere in
his room. Kuper's Gregor, however, is contemplating his family's future,
virtually wallowing in self-pity and lying inertly on his back in the centre of
the darkened room. The bird's-eye perspective of the panel, the margins of
which represent the dimensions of the room, offers the reader a profound
overview of the whole situation, and moreover allows him intimately to
dive into the depths of Gregor's mind. The reader feels like descending into
an enormous dark gorge, in which Gregor lies torn between acting and not
acting. He serves as an internal focaliser once again as he is positioned cen-
trally in the room, lying on his back; additionally, it feels as if the same
room were closing in on him in his state of solitude and pondering. Kuper's
comic style proves to be a useful tool for an even closer reading of the story
and complements it by adding new meaning.

Fig. 7. Hunt Emerson, front cover of Lady Chatterley^s Lover ! The Comic Book, adapted from
D.H. Lawrence. © 1986 by Hunt Emerson. Courtesy of Hunt Emerson.

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 Critic 72.3 99

Whereas Kuper' s aim was to find a way of translating Kafka's short

story into a comic without altering the depressing atmosphere the original
work conveys, the focal point of Hunt Emerson's zany adaptation of D. H.
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is the humorous deconstruction of a clas-
sic. The comic book was released in 1986 and became an instant success for
the small independent publisher Knockabout Comics. Lawrence's original
novel, which was banned until the early 1960s due to its explicit sexuality
and bawdy language, tells the story of Constance Chatterley (also known as
Connie). The heroine is married to Clifford Chatterley, Lord of Wragby
Hall, who sits in a wheelchair and is not able to make love to his wife. Lady
Chatterley soon finds her husband's constant moralising and his lack of
masculinity unbearable and begins a passionate affair with the gamekeeper
Oliver Mellors. In the comic, the slowly unfolding story of the rather tender
blossoming of Connie and Mellors's love becomes a humorous game of sex-
ual attraction and role cliches. This is depicted on the cover of the comic
book by showing a coy, grinning Connie in the foreground and Mellors fol-
lowing her, hiding his private parts while anxiously trying to move through
the thick, jungle-like forest that lashes out at him. This kind of eye candy is
representative of Emerson's style. Generally, his lines are smooth, casual,
and flowing. The single panels are elaborately hatched and abound in visu-
al puns that Emerson adds to create his own specific comic diction.
Emerson renders the almost three-hundred-page novel in only fifty-one
comic pages, yet the comic adaptation's dual capacity to codify the plot in
both text and picture makes additional pages obsolete. A single comic page
has the potential to encapsulate a significantly larger number of pages from
the novel without curtailing much of the original plot. The comic might also
add new layers of meaning as "no adaptation can be expected to translate
its source material to a new medium without bringing in new elements or
interpretations" (Johnson 79). Emerson manages to retain the novel's core
with all its essential bits and pieces. By transforming it he sets off resplen-
dent visual fireworks, seasoned with humour and witty character interac-
tion.

One such example of Emerson's idiosyncratic style can be seen when

Connie and her sister Hilda travel to Europe. Connie is in a bad mood
because she sees Wragby Hall and her marriage as a gloomy cage, and thus
Hilda wants her to find distraction abroad. Emerson spreads this scene into
a number of large panels, of which the most prominent one fills a whole
page. It features so many different allusions to historical figures and events
that it would go beyond the scope of this essay to name them all. The loca-
tion of a dance hall can be made out by the typically European marble arch-
es in the background. Moreover, Emerson seems to have been inspired by
the style of the German artist Georg Grosz, for he decidedly drew several
characters in Grosz's style, e.g., the man on the balcony or the man at the
roulette table. Historical persons like Salvador Dalí (the man with the cane),

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100 Pointner and Boschenhoff

Fig. 8. Hunt Emerson, Lady Chatterley's Lover! The Comic Book , 45. © 1986 by Hunt Emerson.
Courtesy of Hunt Emerson.

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 Critic 72.3 101

Sigmund Freud (analysing the dream of the falling penis), T.S. Eliot (still
thinking about a title for what later would become The Waste Land), Aldous
Huxley (with a peyote plant), and the occultist Madam Blavatsky make an
appearance and indicate that the two sisters are currently in the very heart
of a most extraordinary gathering. In contrast, the underlying passage from
Lawrence's work is fairly unemotional, describing the stay in Europe over
several pages, whereas Emerson boils it all down to one huge orgy void of
panels and speech balloons. The overall notion of orgiastic chaos is further
supported by his avoiding the primary structuring device of comics: panel
sequences. The lack of structure on the page corresponds to the disorderly
behaviour of the protagonists. As the characters freely overlap each other,
the sexual atmosphere of the picture is quite charged. One is guided by a
single boxed caption, consisting of a mixed assortment of text passages
from the novel.
Even though panels that convey empty and open space are relatively
sparse in his comic, Emerson uses them tactically and deliberately. They
serve as a very effective stylistic device in comparison to the majority of
panels tightly filled with meaning and action. When Connie and her lover
Mellors depart after a secret meeting in the woods, the reader sees her star-
ing yearningly at Mellors, who is walking away with his dog. Lawrence's
description of the scene is as follows: "She looked at him wistfully before
she turned. His dog was waiting so anxiously for him to go, and he seemed
to have nothing whatever to say. Nothing left" (117). Indeed, no written text
could speak louder than Connie's forlorn posture when she watches
Mellors leave her. The background is left completely white on purpose with
only the hint of landscape around the vanishing figures of Mellors and his
dog. That Mellors is indeed leaving is conveyed through the difference in
size between him and Connie, marking him as the one in the background.
Both Mellors and the dog look as if they were walking right out of the comic
book- the panel is positioned at the right margin of the page and Connie is
left alone and without any relation to the space around her, in the void of
the empty panel.
However, Lady Chatterley's Lover is not Emerson's most elaborate work.
In his adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner," first published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), Emerson had the oppor-
tunity to showcase the full scope of his artistic and humorous talent. The
comic book, which was first issued in 1989 and again in 2007, convincingly
translates Coleridge's famous ballad into a comic. Emerson includes the
entire unabridged text of the 1817 version of the poem, bereft of most of the
original text's arcane spellings and obsolete words. The ballad renders a
spellbinding ghost story of an old sailor who tells a wedding guest about
his traumatic experience at sea - a story he tells whenever anyone pays
enough attention to him. One might pose the question of how a gothic tale
can be the basis for a humorous comic rendition. However, Emerson found

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102 Pointner and Boschenhoff

Fig. 10. Emerson & Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Courtesy of Hunt Emerson.

a means to tackle the ballad without tearing it apart: he translates

Coleridge's metaphors, similes, and onomatopoetic devices into pictures,
thus reducing them to absurdity. This artifice works so well that the result
is a fast-paced comic that not only pays respect to Coleridge's ballad, but
also makes it accessible to today's reader, who might have problems with
Coleridge's subject matter and, most of all, his archaic language. Linking
the text to our modern world is only one means Emerson employs to make
the story more digestible for us today. In order to substantiate this point let
us concentrate our analysis on those rhetorical devices expressing space.
In the beginning of Coleridge's narrative the ship is stuck in Antarctic
ice. In order to express the hopelessness of the situation, Coleridge uses
polysyndetic lines making the ice even auditorily perceptible through ono-
matopoeia:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound. (Wu 529)

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 Critic 72.3 103

Fig. 11. Hunt Emerson, The Rime of the Ancient Manner, 7. © 2007 by Hunt Emerson. Courtesy
of Hunt Emerson.

Artists like Gustave Doré have always felt compelled to translate this
rhetorical deluge into pictures with icebergs virtually besieging the helpless
sailors. Emerson, however, chooses to deliberately misread Coleridge's
onomatopoeia, literally presenting his reader with a sea of ice cubes upon
which the frozen verbs "crack, roar, howl, growl" tower, solid like barriers
carved in ice. And there is more: Emerson renders the ubiquity of the tow-
ering ice, true to his tongue-in-cheek style, by drawing a signpost equipped
with plates reading "Ice Here, Ice This Way, Ice There, Ice Over Here, You
Want Ice? Step This Way," thereby expressing that the icy desert far exceeds
the limits of the panel.
The ship is represented only by its railing and deck depicted in the
lower half of the panel, featuring three shipmates and the mariner himself.
The mariner asks "What's a swound?" and receives the answer "Dunno-
but it must be noisy!" The humour of the situation arises because the
mariner, as a character in the comic book, comments on the narrator's lan-
guage in the caption above: "The incongruity of the mariner being the
mouthpiece of the modern reader who is unaccustomed to Coleridge's lan-
guage once again closes the distance between Coleridge and us today, thus
making the poem, by pointing towards its inaccessibility, accessible for us"
(Pointner 210).
Similarly, the comic replicates the settings of the mariner's ship stuck in
a calm after the fair winds have dropped (see figure 12). Emerson takes
Coleridge's narrative device expressing the utter inertness of the vessel and
directly depicts his simile "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean"
in a picture (Coleridge 531). The gilded frame containing the ship is half
submerged in the ocean. To complete the incongruent appearance of the

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104 Pointner and Boschenhoff

Fig. 12. Hunt Emerson, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 16. © 2007 by Hunt Emerson. Courtesy
of Hunt Emerson.

panel, little numbers have been added to the various drawn objects or
forms, reminiscent of a paint-by-numbers picture. By constantly engaging
Coleridge's text, the comic uses a panel's space for its own purposes, i.e., to
reify the language and stylistic devices used and not simply illustrate.
Everything that Emerson found visually translatable and conducive to
evoking an amused smile on the reader's lips was implemented, thus con-
structing a comic laden with visual puns.
We hope we were able to demonstrate that graphic fiction has an
advantage over prose concerning the immediacy of the portrayal of topog-
raphy. The enduring opinion that comics are ill equipped for the adaptation
of literary texts is ill founded when it comes to the depiction of space. There
is reason to believe that we would come to similar results investigating the
depiction of movement. However, the question remains as to whether there
is anything that prose texts can convey more concisely than comics, and one
answer may be said to lie in the rendering of allegory. Extended metaphors
may lose their appeal if reified in images that do not leave the reader room
for her own interpretation. Kafka, for example, strictly opposed any kind of
direct depiction of Gregor as a bug, stating that "the insect itself is not to be
drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance" (qtd. in Jones 2006). As
soon as the bug is no longer a mental construct- be it a visual representa-
tion in theatre, film, illustration or on the page of a comic book- readers

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 Critic 72.3 105

may find it difficult to interpret Gregor' s reification as an allegory of his

marginalised state in society, in general, and his family, in particular. Hunt
Emerson, on the other hand, willingly accepts this incongruency between
verbal allegory and pictorial rendition in order to turn Coleridge's "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner" into a comic in the etymological sense, thus
making a virtue out of necessity.

University of Duisburg-Essen

Notes

1 The essay has been jointly conceived by the two authors, although Frank Pointner
has concentrated more on the first and Sandra Boschenhoff more on the second half.

2 We would like heartily to thank Peter Kuper and Hunt Emerson for allowing us to
reproduce their artworks.

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