Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  In “Oliver Introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman,” Cruikshank’s Fagin holds a toasting fork that resembles a devil’s pitchfork. Fagin’s leering grin alone could easily kill unsuspecting Oliver in Svengali-like fashion. In making Trilby his musical trill, Svengali does eventually “kill” (T 20) La Svengali. The baton that Svengali uses to command Trilby to sing functions much like a devil’s pitchfork. Svengali has “big yellow teeth baring themselves in a mongrel canine snarl” as well as “insolent black eyes” (136). Whereas Dickens describes Fagin as a “loathsome reptile” (OT, Oxf. 1982 116), Du Maurier calls Svengali a pedigreeless mongrel—animal associations that devalue these physically “repulsive” types. While Fagin’s “villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair” (50), Svengali’s “thick, heavy, languid, lustreless black hair fell down behind his ears on to his shoulders, in that musicianlike way that is so offensive to the normal Englishman” (T 11–12). Their hair color differs—Fagin has flaming hair, a color associated with the devil, and Svengali has a dark shock of hair—but both Jews have unkempt manes and looks that are “offensive to the normal Englishman.” Du Maurier does not call Svengali “the Jew” as Dickens calls Fagin, but he refers to Svengali’s disturbing Hebrew qualities that separate him from a refined Englishman. For example, Svengali speaks French with a “Hebrew-German accent … uttered in his hoarse, rasping, nasal, throaty rook’s caw” (136).

  In addition to his yellow teeth and snarly mouth, Svengali “is depicted as the hook-nosed Mephistophelian Jew-demon, a caricature already familiar from that of Fagin and others and one that continues to this day” (Kerker).56 Interestingly, neither author makes direct mention of the length of his villain’s nose. Dickens does comment on Noah Claypole’s “small red nose” (OT, Oxf. 1982 36), an indirect clue to the length of Fagin’s nose in “The Jew and Morris Bolter Begin to Understand Each Other” (see fig. 45B). This scene takes place at the Three Cripples pub where Fagin meets Noah Claypole, now in London under the name of Morris Bolter. Dickens narrates: “The Jew followed up this remark by striking the side of his nose with his right forefinger,—a gesture which Noah attempted to imitate, though not with complete success, in consequence of his own nose not being large enough for the purpose” (OT, Oxf. 1982 271). In the accompanying plate, Noah’s nose is too small to accommodate this Victorian gesture to signal to another person that he or she is in the know. But Cruikshank in this and other plates makes much of Fagin’s pointy Semitic nose, which is more than “large enough for the purpose” of striking with his long, bony right forefinger.57 The racialized caricature of the hooknosed villainous Jew that Du Maurier carries into Trilby in plates such as “‘Et Maintenant Dors, Ma Mignonne!’” (see fig. 45A) thus comes as much from Cruikshank as it does from Dickens. Du Maurier does not describe Svengali’s nose, but he draws Svengali’s imposing nose in a manner that recalls Fagin’s nose—it is long enough to signal in Fagin-like fashion that he, too, is in the know of Jewish villainy.

  Of all the Svengali illustrations, “An Incubus” (T 137) (see fig. 46) is the most darkly comic. The title comes from a quote where Trilby perceives Svengali is “a dread, powerful demon, who … oppressed and weighed on her like an incubus” (136–37). In this small but powerful vignette, Du Maurier draws Svengali as the embodiment of Trilby’s fear: he is part human, part arachnid, and part demon. Svengali has a human head, but a spider’s body. Blackness, a color long associated with darkness and witchcraft, extends from his spidery legs to his “killer” eyes, pronounced nose, and thick wild hair, here fashioned to suggest a devil’s horns. An incubus preys upon women in the night. Gazing directly at the viewer, Svengali the male demon looks as if he can simultaneously hypnotize the viewer as well as Trilby, who falls under his sexual and musical control. Kelly calls this a nightmare cartoon: Du Maurier is “working within the nineteenth-century visual tradition epitomized in the drawings of Cruikshank” (155)58 and arguably of Thackeray.

  Figure 46. “An Incubus.” Illustration by George Du Maurier for his “Trilby” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1894. From Special Collections, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.

  If we view this illustration as a manifestation of Trilby’s fear of the musical genius, it recalls “Becky’s Second Appearance in the ‘Character of Clytemnestra’” (see fig. 14, ch. 2, 69), which we can read as a projection of Jos Sedley’s dreaded fear of manipulative Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (VF, 1848). Becky first binds Jos’s hands in a web of green silk for a purse she is making before she fishes for him and presumably hooks him late in the novel. In “An Incubus,” Svengali looks as if he can lure Trilby into a hypnotic web and deliver her a fate worse than that of Fagin’s boys, who thieve for their master, or even of Jos Sedley, who is destined to be “‘prey to woman’” (VF Oxf. 36). Trilby becomes La Svengali, an extension of Svengali, who even linguistically subsumes her. Trilby loses her own identity as she sings solely for Svengali’s profit and dies a premature death.59

  Svengali, too, dies, but his power extends beyond the grave through the power of photography.60 Du Maurier draws a photograph of Svengali “looking straight out of the picture, straight at you” (T 430). This “splendid photograph by a Viennese photographer, and a most speaking likeness” (430) that Trilby receives just before her death forms the subject of a plate entitled “Out of the Mysterious East” (432). With near photographic accuracy, Du Maurier captures the essence of Svengali in this still tableau. Svengali’s hands are motionless but raised as if to command Trilby to sing. Trilby becomes hypnotized once again, this time by the photographic portrait, which embodies the racialized caricature of the Jew. Although Trilby has not been able to sing since Svengali’s death from a heart attack brought on by seeing les trois Angliches during one of La Svengali’s performances, suddenly, “staring intently at the portrait, … her eyes dilated, and quite a strange light in them” (432). As Trilby begins to sing Chopin’s “Impromptu in A Flat” (433), her eyes remain fixed on Svengali’s photograph. Trilby’s outstanding musical performance astounds the three artists and Mrs. Bagot. However, as soon as Trilby finishes the song, she folds her hands over her chest, utters three words in a faint voice—“‘Svengali…. Svengali…. Svengali! …’” (435)—and dies. The photograph of the incubus is as potent as Svengali’s person and mesmerizes Trilby to sing to her death.

  In fin-de-siècle illustration in areas as diverse as Du Maurier’s mesmerizing blockbusters and Beatrix Potter’s enduring children’s tales, we see fluidity and continuity between schools of illustration in the evolution of the Victorian illustrated book. Even as economic and aesthetic factors led to a marked decrease in newly released, large-circulation illustrated adult fiction published in Britain in volume form, the achievements of these author-illustrators invite us to think of the fin de siècle neither as a period of decline nor simply as an extension of the Sixties school of representational realism. Potter draws the landscapes and animals that populate her children’s tales with near photographic accuracy, recalling the art of Millais. Du Maurier, an illustrator of the Millais school, reengages the caricature style associated with Cruikshank and continues the Sixties representational style of illustration. Du Maurier’s theatrical presentation of Svengali also perpetuates a persistent stereotype of a minority group that gets a much-needed makeover in a graphic novel adaptation of Oliver Twist when Will Eisner remediates the Jewish villain in Fagin the Jew (2003).

  Conclusion

  The Victorian Graphic Classics—Heir of the Victorian Illustrated Book

  In respect of illustration the modern novel has a withered limb, and while with many novelists it might just as well be withered, since they have no need of it, one cannot say who might have used it with the strength, suppleness, and sensitivity of a hand.

  John R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators, 1971

  John Harvey concludes Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators by raising the possibility that some modern nove
ls might have benefited from “the strength, suppleness, and sensitivity of [an illustrator’s] hand” (181). These sensitive hands may well belong to today’s graphic novelists and artists who have revived a style of composing through two arts, a way of reading a book with pictures, and a canon of great books. The term “graphic classics” describes an intersection of the traditional canon of western literature and the graphic novel. Graphic novel adaptations have reduced the length of nineteenth-century novels and refashioned them into a prescient textual-visual, hyper-modern form that brings new audiences to authors including Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, the Brontës, Jane Austen, and most recently Anthony Trollope.

  This chapter argues that the graphic classics is a late-stage evolution of the Victorian illustrated book, giving the genre new expression for our time.1 This modern form of material culture is an heir of the Victorian illustrated book. The graphic classics is not the only form of word and picture storytelling that “makes it possible to think about Victorian illustrated books from a new perspective: to situate them, as it were, in a new canon” (419), as Richard Maxwell proposes in his afterword to The Victorian Illustrated Book.2 But the Victorian illustrated book and the graphic novel, including the graphic classics, share marked similarities in how they are composed and how we read them; both genres have developed from related word and image traditions and have interwoven origins.

  To the Victorians, reading was visual and verbal. The term “reader-viewer” readily applies to the audience of the graphic novel and the Victorian illustrated book. The graphic novel is essentially a lengthy, high-end comic book printed on quality paper and bound with a spine to make it appear like a novel. It is also cinematic in nature—made up of sequential panels (also called frames) with black-and-white and color graphics that incorporate word balloons, thought bubbles, captions, a variety of fonts and hand lettering, motion lines (also called speed lines), and sound effects (onomatopoeic words).3 The eye moves over each panel to gather meaning, rather than move straight across to read the lines of text from the top of the page to the bottom as in reading a book composed all of words.4 Nonetheless, as Stephen Tabachnick notes, “graphic novels offer a reading experience in which, as in traditional reading, the reader controls the speed of perception and can linger or look backward at will” (“Graphic Novel” 2).5 George Du Maurier’s oft-cited description of reading the Victorian illustrated book thus applies to reading the graphic novel; today’s reader-viewer can study the graphics “with such passionate interest before reading the story, and after, and between” as Du Maurier suggests in “The Illustrating of Books” (1: 350).

  Parallels also lie in the composing processes and the essential role pictures play in both hybrid art forms.6 To recall Harvey’s description of the relationship between author and illustrator in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators: “The novelist wrote in collaboration with an artist he had worked with often before; he wrote knowing he must have illustrations, and designed them at the same time that he was writing his monthly part—sometimes before” (180).7 Leading authors of graphic novels such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman likewise work closely with artists, including pencillers, inkers, colorists, and letterers,8 and write their texts, called scripts, knowing—even more than Dickens did—that pictures will play a quintessential role in their stories.9 The script of a graphic novel cannot stand on its own as an unillustrated edition of a Dickens novel can. Author-illustrators also populate both genres; following in the footsteps of Lewis Carroll and William Makepeace Thackeray are, among others, Jeff Lemire, Stan Sakai, and Will Eisner, who popularized the term “graphic novel” to promote A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978).10

  The recognized father of modern comics, Rodolphe Töpffer, is an heir of the established father of graphic satire and caricature, William Hogarth.11 The British Hogarth influenced the Swiss Töpffer, creator of picture stories like Histoire de M. Jabot (1833) that “featured the first interdependent combination of words and pictures seen in Europe” (McCloud 17).12 Scott McCloud, Stephen Tabachnick, and other comics scholars align the birth of modern comics with Töpffer, who, like George Cruikshank and other caricaturists, was influenced by eighteenth-century British satirical artists who presented work in a sequence—principally Hogarth, William Rowlandson, and James Gillray.13 Installments in monthly and weekly publications and daily and weekly comics—serial forms of publication—respectively, ushered in the Victorian illustrated book and the graphic novel. As Simon Grennan observes in “Perhaps I’ll Draw and You Complete the Story …”: “although we usually think of the comic-strip as a short-form medium, it parallels the historic development of the novel in becoming a long form through serialisation” (55).

  The comic book is a “desultory form of publication” (P, Oxf. xxxiv), to recall Dickens’s estimation of serialization, the publishing format in which he launched his professional career as a novelist. Indeed, many graphic novels are comic book series compiled to be read as a single-volume book.14 Some authors and artists find the term “graphic novel” a pretentious marketing tool to ease the humble genre’s entrance into libraries, bookstores, and the Academy. Frequently quoted is Gaiman’s response to an editor of a literary page of a major newspaper who complimented him for being a graphic novelist, not a comic book writer; Gaiman reports in an article published in the Los Angeles Times: “‘And I suddenly felt like someone who had been informed that she wasn’t a hooker, that in fact she was a lady of the evening’” (qtd. in Erickson).

  Regardless of what we call someone like Gaiman, his comment points to the marginality that the graphic novelist shares with the Victorian book illustrator. George Du Maurier admits in “The Illustrating of Books” that the illustrator of books and periodicals “must not hope for any very high place in the hierarchy of art. The great prizes are not for him!” (2: 374). Du Maurier’s estimation of the illustrator’s stature parallels Steven Weiner’s assessment of the comic book artist: “few professionals saw the field as a real career. Comic books were the lowest rung of the cultural ladder; the pay was poor, the production shoddy” (3).15 The idea that the field of comics is not a “real career” for professional artists echoes the worry that Dickens, according to William Harrison Ainsworth, was making a “grave mistake in writing fiction in this popular form, the loose-covered serial” (A. N. Wilson 19)—although history tells us otherwise. “While film and theater have long ago established their credentials,” as Eisner contends in Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, “comics still struggle for acceptance, and the art form, after more than ninety years of popular use, is still regarded as a problematic literary vehicle” (3).16 McCloud wrote Understanding Comics (1993) with the aim of “Setting the Record Straight” (the title of his first chapter), and he recognizes that to many readers, comic books are “crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare” (3).

  “The history of graphic novel adaptation is itself bedevilled by the idea that comics can introduce children to literature,” notes Grennan (“Perhaps I’ll Draw” 55). The impulse to adapt classics into graphic novels grows out of a comic book industry development that Albert Kanter initiated in 1941 with his Classics Illustrated comic book series. Kanter founded his series (originally called Classical Comics) as a gateway to the great books; he repackaged the classics in comic book form to appeal to young, reluctant readers. There are 169 titles in the series that ran from 1941–71 and had a huge fan base—2 to 4 million copies sold each month.17 Classic story adaptation, a trademark of the comic book industry, paved the way for the current trend of adapting nineteenth-century novels into graphic novel format for a grown-up readership.

  DC Comics began to target an audience of adult readers (many of whom were avid comic book readers from childhood) by publishing graphic novels about superheroes with mature content and high-quality visuals, notably Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986), with artwork by Dave Gibbons, and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), with artwork by
Klaus Janson. Art Spiegelman’s author-illustrated, Pulitzer–Prize-winning graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986), a full-length story of the Holocaust, “permanently altered” the “graphic novel landscape” (Weiner 35). Suddenly there was a vast adult non-comics-reading public clamoring to read serious, in-depth graphic novels even though “its predecessor, the comic book, was the victim of a serious bad rap” (Van Ness 8).

  With the 2015 graphic novel adaptation of Trollope’s John Caldigate (JC, 1879) and recent manga-style adaptations of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816) by Udon Entertainment in 2014 and 2015, respectively, the popularity of the graphic classics shows no signs of abating. This chapter surveys graphic novel adaptation of nineteenth-century novels that originally appeared without illustrations or with few illustrations, the area of graphic classics most flourishing to date. Selected adaptations reveal how, in developing historical and psychological elements and topics improper for a Victorian middle-class readership, the graphic classics genre is rekindling the Victorian conception of illustration as revelatory—shedding light upon the text.18 This chapter features graphic novel adaptations of two Victorian works that originally came out with illustrations—Oliver Twist (OT, 1838) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AA, 1865)—to demonstrate how the graphic classics returns to and repurposes designs by those who first imagined these characters and scenes.

  Many of Dickens’s richly visual novels illustrated first by the caricaturists and then refashioned by Sixties artists are now reenvisioned by graphic novelists and artists. Graphic classics adaptations of Dickens’s works surpass that of any other Victorian author. To date, there are graphic classics versions of A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist, Great Expectations (1861), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). No title is more adapted than Oliver Twist. Although Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872) has caught the graphic novelist’s eye, there are more exciting adaptations of Alice in Wonderland. In graphic novel adaptations of Oliver Twist and Alice in Wonderland, we find reengagement with the schools of caricature and realism and the imprint of the original Victorian illustrators. Graphic novelists and artists revisit iconic illustrations and themes in the source texts, such as Cruikshank’s caricature of the starving workhouse children in “Oliver Asking for More” and Alice’s unstoppable growth motif drawn by Carroll in the caricature tradition for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (UG, 1864) and refined by John Tenniel for Alice in Wonderland. Most central to this chapter is Fagin the Jew (2003) in which Will Eisner intentionally revises Dickens and Cruikshank’s persistent religious and ethnic stereotype of the Jew in Oliver Twist.