By Beth Hewitt
A
dear friend of mine likes to tell the story of how the
legendary Classics
Illustrated saved
his scholarly ass: during his candidacy exams, he managed
to survive this particular ritual of academic hazing solely
by the miracle of recalling the plots he had read years
earlier in comic form. While his colleagues smile
condescendingly—the story confirming their conviction in
the puerility of comics—I guffaw because, to my mind,
rather than confirming the childishness of comics, the
tales chosen for Albert Kanter’s original series (adventure
stories by Dumas, Scott, Cooper, Stevenson) confirm the
essential juvenility of so many novels. My friend tries to
vindicate his early reading choices by explaining that the
pleasure of Classics Illustrated
was not their function as
illustrated Spark
Notes, but as
works of art that served as homage to their original
sources.
Since the discontinuation of Classics Illustrated
and Classics Illustrated
Junior (in 1971),
there have been numerous (largely unsuccessful) attempts to
revive the project. The most recent of these is
Marvel
Illustrated, a
new line of 6-issue comics, inspired by Kanter’s
Classics
Illustrated,
which has already published The Last of the
Mohicans,
Treasure
Island,
Moby-Dick, The Illiad, and Picture of Dorian
Gray. As was the
case with Kanter’s original, these new titles do more than
merely summarize plots with pretty pictures. Indeed,
reading them, I was struck again and again by the ways that
the comics so often brilliantly get the essence of the
classic text.
The most impressive, I think, is the recently completed
adaptation of Moby
Dick. In many
ways, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
has always seemed the most
improbable of titles for a comic book: its narrative seems
too slender and its non-narrative parts too immense for
graphic representation. Unlike the other fiction mined for
Classics Illustrated, the novel of Ahab’s obsession with
the white whale—with its chapters devoted to cetology or
meditations on transcendentalism and misanthropy—does not
seem especially well suited to the impulse towards
adventure fiction that appears to undergird the publishing
project of both the old and new classic literature series.
And yet, the new version by Roy Thomas and Pascal Alixe is
a stunning representation not just of the novel’s basic
plot, but also of the novel’s generic originality and
philosophical challenges. We move quickly through the
novel, but the abridgment is really nothing short of
masterful. I was a fan after the first page, which begins
with the famous first words from the novel (“Call me
Ishmael. Some years ago, having little or no money in my
purse, I thought I would see the water part of the world.”)
Offering a full page picture of Ishmael, who seems a bit
younger and a bit more attractive than my mind’s eye always
fancied him, Melville’s text litters the page as a series
of torn text boxes, subtly emphasizing the textuality of
the novel—that this is Ishmael’s story as recollected and
written down on paper. The first issue quickly moves us to
Ishmael and Queequeg’s first romantic night in Spouter’s
Inn, their decision to ship with the Pequot, and concludes
with the first sighting of Ahab. But the pacing somehow—I’m
not even entirely sure how—manages to represent the
meditative deliberation of Melville’s novel even as it
condenses the 600 page novel.
I was not quite as blown away by some of the other titles,
but they were all well done, and I was consistently
impressed with Thomas’s writing. In interviews he explains
that he long wanted to work on this project, and his
appreciation for the authors he reworks is evident on every
page. In his Last
of the Mohicans,
for example, he splendidly produces Cooper’s action plot at
the same time as he evokes the slow and evocative mood
conveyed by the original novel. The illustrator of
Mohicans, Steve Kurth, produces more standard
fare than did Alixe in Moby Dick (indeed, the art looks a lot like the
version from 50 years earlier). While the art in
Moby Dick
captures the spirit of the
novel, I was disappointed not to see Kurth get the essence
of Cooper. Surprisingly, it would have been easier to “get
the spirit” of Cooper, given the novelist’s own tendency
towards visual description and the substantial artistic
tradition of illustrations from Cooper’s novels. I would
like to have seen something of that picturesque quality in
the comic, but the framing is small, and much of the comic
is tight shots of fight scenes. The pictures are
dynamic—but the aim seems less like a intellectual attempt
to put Cooper’s novel into a combination of words and
pictures, as it is an attempt to juice up Cooper by turning
every frame into an action scene.
Both Treasure
Island and
The Picture of Dorian
Gray better
captured the aesthetic style of the originals. The
illustrations in Treasure Island
(done by Mario Gully)
resemble those in Last of the
Mohicans, with
lots of very small horizontal rectangular frames, causing
the tale to have a kind of hyperbolic dynamism. I like it
better here, as it sits more neatly with the story:
together both Thomas and Gully nicely represent the story
as Jim Hawkins tells it—with the limited perspective of a
child breathlessly telling the adventure story that
children have been reading for years. In
Dorian
Gray, the
illustrator, Sebastian Fiumara, masterfully captures Oscar
Wilde’s aesthetic (while continuing to rest in Thomas’s
skillful hands at adapting the novel). The muted pastel
colors, the emphasis on line design, the Beardsley-like
style perfect captures the surreal landscape of the novel.
I will confess that I was annoyed by Marvel’s decision to
do a version of The Illiad. Why, I thought, are they reproducing a
text that is being so masterfully handled by Eric Shanower
in Age of
Bronze (I should
note, however, that the series has hired Shanower to write
their Wizard of
Oz series, which
I eagerly await.) Even Thomas’s writing here doesn’t
approach the level of his other titles. My guess is that
because the source material is poetic, and because,
therefore, he cannot turn to it as faithfully, the writing
seems somehow less, how shall I say, literary. One of the
aspects of the other comics (but especially
Moby
Dick) that I
enjoy so much is that so much of the script is taken from
the original. The artist here, Miguel Angel Sepulveda, also
seems to suffer some of the same challenges as did Gully
and Kurth. Attempting to inject “energy” into the classic
tale, the Illiad
is dominated with tiny
horizontal boxes that contradict the epic grandeur of the
story. When Sepulveda gives himself the luxury of the full
page, things really open up, but such moments are too rare.
Any of these quarrels aside, I am grateful that Marvel has
decided to put their publishing might behind this worthy
venture—and that they put it in the remarkably capable
hands of Roy Thomas. These are splendid versions of
splendid novels, and I am certain they will find readers of
all ages, including (no doubt) some who will one day become
literature professors.
