Blog

The Josephine Ulrick Literature and Poetry prizes offer an eye-popping $20,000 to the winner in each category. Now in its tenth year, this is the first time the twenty grand prize pool has been awa...  >

Elsewhere
Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do >

Other

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

Graphic Classics

May 20

A few small publishers in the US are embarking on projects to turn Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy and co. into comic books in order to bring them to younger audiences.

Graphic Classics have been doing so for over 5 years and they have a healthy collection of classics-turned-comic from Bram Stoker right up to Mark Twain. Each volume rather ambitiously adapts a range stories by the same author – the Oscar Wilde edition for example is made up of not just The Picture of Dorian Grey but also The Canterville Ghost, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, Salome. Some of these strike me as a little gimmicky, but then again I’m not the target audience. As a teen, I misguidedly tried to tackle many of the ‘great works’ but found that most were beyond me – the lurid colours, dramatic stills, bubbled speech and wide-popping eyes of these comics may well speak to the YA readership in a way that the traditional novel can’t and act as a stepping stone to the world of wider literature. Classics like H.G Wells (The Time Machine and War of the Worlds) would certainly work well in the genre, but I’m a little more sceptical about adapting Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women into graphic form (which apparently will come out later in 2009).

Sterling Publishing’s adaptations of classics into graphic novels look a little more appealing. This illustrated distillation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment by French artist Alain Korkos keenly evokes a sense of blackness and violence: ‘And, in the dark, a thought came to me that no one had ever had before me: I wanted to kill someone, just in order to dare’.

I’d also be keen to read their version of Edger Allan Poe’s works, including the The Raven, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Tell-Tale Heart. This type of thing has already been done to great success in Australia by Nicki Greenberg, in her stunning rendition of The Great Gatsby (see George Dunford's essay on the Australian graphic novel scene from Vol 68 No 1 here). The trick when it comes to graphic adaptations is to reduce the lengthy novel to the sum of its parts – the scraps of dialogue and scenes and descriptions that best convey the story in only a few lines. As the New York Times writes, it’s simply about ‘play[ing] surgeon instead of butcher’.

JA

9781411415942l


 

Our Friends


 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.