Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  Figure 51. “Marley’s Ghost.” Script by Seán Michael Wilson, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David Roach, and colors by James Offredi for A Christmas Carol: The Graphic Novel, 2008. © Classical Comics Ltd.

  A related development to the nineteenth-century graphic classics is the popular Neo-Victorian graphic novel, which draws heavily upon literary and historical characters from fin-de-siècle novels. There are three principal types of the Neo-Victorian graphic novel. In one type, an adaptor builds a new storyline from characters of Victorian novels, such as in the Eisner-award winning The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O’Neill. Alternately, Neo-Victorian adaptations inspired by Victorian history include the heavily footnoted yet fictional From Hell (1991) about the origins of Jack the Ripper, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell, and Gotham by Gaslight (1989), a DC Comics adaptation written by Brian Augustyn and illustrated by Mike Mignola that merges Jack the Ripper with Batman. Neo-Victorian graphic novels in a third category bring contemporary superheroes face to face with characters from nineteenth-century novels; DC Comics published two prime examples in 2011—Batman: Through the Looking Glass, written by Bruce Jones with artwork by Sam Kieth, and Batman: Noël, adapted and illustrated by Lee Bermejo.

  More than any other Neo-Victorian graphic novel, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, first published as a six-issue comic series in 1999, “fuses almost every late-Victorian literary character that students have ever heard of into a monstrously inclusive plot” (Ferguson 204). In this novel set in 1898, Victorian characters become “superheroes” fighting injustice. The league includes Robert Louis Stevenson’s divided man, the respected Dr. Henry Jekyll and the infamous Edward Hyde; Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker from Dracula (1897), who joins with her fiancé to bring down Count Dracula; Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, the mysterious antihero from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), who is motivated to fight the evils of British imperialism; Griffin, the scientist from H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novella The Invisible Man (1897), who develops a body to absorb (rather than reflect) light to appear invisible; and H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, a big-game hunter from King Solomon’s Mines (1885), who remains sensitive to the native Africans in the midst of Britain’s “civilizing influence.” The League thus allows reader-viewers to experience intertextuality—not between a canonical work and its graphic novel adaption as in editions of Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre, but among fin-de-siècle works joined in a fictional context.

  The cover of the first issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen illustrates the dark side of the late British Empire in arranging fin-de-siècle fictional characters as Victorian superheroes against a backdrop of portraits, paintings, and sculptures. A headless but elegant ancient statue, a skull, and a painting of a skeleton lying on its back symbolize the duality of the late Victorian era—a time that was elegant and alive, yet simultaneously deadly and deadened as these images show. Among framed portraits of respectable gentlemen on the wall hang, for example, a picture of a native, likely from one of Britain’s colonial holdings, and a painting of an elephant in chains in an exotic setting; these graphics visualize the ugliness of the imperialistic British Empire at century’s end that Captain Nemo fights against. Hyde, whose hideous face appears behind that of Dr. Jekyll, highlights simultaneously how darkness lies within members of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as well as in the Empire that the league’s members vow to protect.

  Batman: Noël combines aspects of Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s renowned American superhero and Gotham City from DC Comics with elements of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Victorian London. In his dedication, author-illustrator Lee Bermejo aptly writes, “With respect, to Charles Dickens.” Moreover, the letterer, Todd Klein maintains an authenticity to Dickens’s classic by bringing “a turn-of the-century Victorian twist to the proceedings with his sharp, succinct chiseled fonts” (Jim Lee qtd. in Bermejo n. pag.). Bermejo casts Batman in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, but the character looks like the Dark Knight rather than the Dickensian Scrooge. Bermejo favors dark variations of the caped crusader’s costume, but includes the most distinctive elements of Batman imagery—the cowl (covering most of the face) with its distinguishing bat-like ears, the stylized bat emblem across the chest of the bat suit, the cape, the utility belt, and the gauntlet-style gloves. Bob Cratchit works for Scrooge/Batman in this adaptation and has a very ill son appropriately named Tim after Tiny Tim and Tim Drake (the third Robin). With a contemporary comic book twist, the three ghosts who visit Batman/Scrooge are also comic book legends—Catwoman, the Ghost of Christmas Past; Superman, the Ghost of Christmas Present; and the Joker, the Ghost of Christmas Future. Bermejo notes in a commentary that he cast Batman as Scrooge to “emphasize the change from the lighthearted Batman of the past to the darker, violent vigilante of today. This of course mirrored the narrative structure of A CHRISTMAS CAROL as well” (Bermejo n. pag.).

  Change is possible even for the most unlikely vigilante, who, in this graphic novel, gets a second chance just as Scrooge does. Batman/Scrooge brings down the Joker, saves Cratchit from dabbling in crime by giving him “A raise, benefits, P.T.O, 401(k), the works” (Bermejo n. pag.), and brings Christmas cheer to Tim Cratchit and “Old friends, business associates, pretty much anyone whose life he’d previously made miserable” (n. pag.). Bermejo’s dialogue cleverly updates Dickens’s work for readers of the twenty-first century, although the pictures confirm that Scrooge still rewards Cratchit with a prize turkey as in the source text.

  Bermejo alternates long shots with close-ups to create a stunning cinematic effect enhanced by boldly lettered sound effects that leap off the pages along with Batman/Scrooge. As DC Comics copublisher and renowned comic book artist Jim Lee notes in the foreword, “Lee [Bermejo]’s neo Gothic work operates on the surface level to entice and please while painting a darker, more disturbing world just underneath that very same scintillating surface” (Bermejo n. pag.). Scrooge’s tomb in a chilly, gray-toned graveyard (see fig. 52) displays Batman’s secret identity as the caped crusader: “Here lies a bat. He died boring predictable and nobody loved him!” (n. pag.). The sky looks bleak, the trees are bare, and snow covers the ground. Bermejo draws a black-and-gray toned costumed Batman/Scrooge literally climbing out of the grave, clawing the ground, and pushing aside snow and rubble as he vows, “Sometimes it takes dyin’ …… to teach a fella how ta LIVE” (n. pag.). In this plate, Batman’s determination to escape death extends from the angle of his pointed bat ears to his exposed chiseled jaw and gritted teeth. With one of his massive muscled arms, Batman/Scrooge seemingly pulls himself up from the grave. With the other arm and gloved hand, he reaches toward the reader-viewer and beyond the picture plane—a gesture that signals the dark vigilante will shed his underworld darkness and once again become the more lighthearted caped crusader of early Batman comics, saving the Cratchits in the process.

  Although this graphic mash-up might offend the sensibilities of Victorian purists, some graphic classics adopt a literary tone, such as the 2015 adaptation of John Caldigate, commissioned by Cardiff University and KU Leuven (a Belgian University) to celebrate the bicentennial of Anthony Trollope’s birth. Trollope was a prolific and popular Victorian author whose novels capture clerical life, the politics of the middle-class Victorian drawing room, and the political arena. John Caldigate, a lesser-known Trollope novel, has been adapted as Dispossession (2015), translated as Courir deux lièvres for the French version (To run two hares).35 Scriptwriter and graphic artist Simon Grennan transformed a lengthy novel of over 500 pages with no illustrations into a 94-page graphic novel with 576 separate color images; not surprisingly, the adaptation is subtitled A Novel of Few Words.

  Figure 52. “Nobody Loved Him.” Illustration by Lee Bermejo for his Batman: Noël, 2011. © DC Comics.

  Originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine from April 1878 to June 1879, John Caldigate follows the life of a see
mingly unpromising Cambridge graduate. The eponymous hero chooses between “the ties of land, entail and good stewardship and the appeal of risk and speculation” (xv), notes R. C. Terry in the introduction to the 1995 Folio Society edition commissioned with sixteen illustrations by Francis Mosley.36 Caldigate dispossesses himself of his title and the prospect of an inherited estate at Folking to pay off his gambling debts; receiving ready money by selling his entail to his father, Caldigate heads to Australia on a ship called the Goldfinder, promptly finds gold, and subsequently returns to England a rich man. Reuniting with his father, Caldigate marries a genteel English woman, Hester Bolton, and lives happily ever after until his Australian past rears its head in the form of a bigamy charge leveled by Euphemia Smith, the widowed adventuress Caldigate meets on his voyage.

  Mrs. Smith who “had seen better days … was now going out to the colony, probably—so the old lady said who was the informant—in search of a second husband” (Trollope, JC 32). In “Performing the Voyage Out,” Janet C. Meyers suggests that Mrs. Euphemia Smith magnifies “the single middle-class woman’s precarious liminality in relation to home and colony” (131). Caldigate lives with Euphemia Smith in the mining town of Ahalala but never marries her; perhaps owing to the pressures of Mudie’s Lending Library or his own morals,37 Trollope never tells the reader they have been living together until Mrs. Smith returns to England and makes a legal claim on Caldigate, now married to Hester. Jailed for bigamy, Caldigate earns a royal pardon when the postage stamp and postmark on a letter that he allegedly sends to a Mrs. John Caldigate (Euphemia Smith) turns out to be a forgery. As Eileen Cleere observes in Avuncularism, “blackmail replaces bigamy in the novel’s economy of crimes” (201).

  In “Perhaps I’ll Draw and You Complete the Story …,” Grennan explains how he adapted Trollope’s novel for a twenty–first-century readership. “Little is ever described in detail,” notes Grennan; “Rather, Trollope is both accurate and equivocal. ‘Perhaps,’ he writes, or ‘it was said of.’ He provides readers with various points of view, never strictly his own, and we make our own sense of them” (55). Grennan gives graphic expression to Trollope’s “equivocal” style through what he describes as “visual techniques of unambiguous ambiguity that I developed in my set of rules for drawing the book” (Interview with Grennan). Using a consistent six-panel format, Grennan places the characters at various distances from the reader-viewer and in different types of tableaux, and from these positions the reader-viewer can see all the dimensions of the novel and complete the story.38

  Building upon an historical dimension intimated in John Caldigate, Grennan innovatively develops Aboriginal and Chinese presences in the Australian gold rush an element that Trollope only hints at. For the scenes set in the mining towns of New South Wales, Grennan depicts the Aborigines both clothed and naked. The Australian natives dominate these frames that include 700 words of Wiradjuri, an Aboriginal language also not included in the original novel. The presence of the Chinese and Aborigines in Australia would not have been widely known to Trollope’s contemporary readers, but Grennan depends upon today’s readers to be knowledgeable about this period of Australia’s history.39 Conversely, notes Grennan, “Trollope’s first readers had knowledge and experience unavailable to us in the 21st century, on which he relied. The meaning of Smith’s straw hat and Dick’s yellow trousers (Ned’s in Dispossession) are the most obvious examples” (Interview with Grennan). To Trollope’s Victorian reader-viewers, clothes and hats spoke to social class and propriety.

  Upon his return to England, Dick Shand, Caldigate’s first mining partner, has reformed his ways—he is no longer a gambler or an alcoholic—but he still has bush manners and wears roughly made yellow trousers “of strong material, and in good order, made of that colour for colonial use” (Trollope, JC 381). Trollope dwells on the yellow trousers, which he correlates with Shand’s equally glaring conduct: “His yellow trousers and the manners which accompanied them were not generally acceptable in merchants’ offices and suchlike places” (495). The yellow pants—the same color of sturdy cloth worn by Australian convicts (Meyers 141)—mark Dick (aka Ned) as an outsider in his homeland. Grennan uses a more brilliant color palette for the prodigal son’s pants than for the clothes of the other English gentlemen and employs the yellow trousers as a motif foreshadowing Shand’s return voyage to Australia at the close of the novel. Caldigate loans his former partner (who helps to exonerate him) the capital to return to Queensland and establish himself as a junior partner of a sugar plantation.

  To Trollope’s first readers, the description of Mrs. Euphemia Smith’s straw hat—part of a “Dolly Varden” style of dress visualized by Phiz in the illustrations for Dickens’s historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841)—independently would have signaled that although the widow is attempting to act innocent, she is anything but that. Phiz drew this popular Dickensian character, known for her flirtatiousness and flashy dress as much as for her disingenuousness, on a series of separate plates to accompany the novel. Dolly Varden also found her way onto canvas most famously in an 1842 oil painting entitled Dolly Varden by William Powell Frith where Dolly sports a straw hat with red ribbons and a rich red cape, details that Grennan consciously recalls for Mrs. Smith’s wardrobe in Dispossession.

  Trollope first points out Mrs. Smith, who shares Caldigate and Shand’s second-class accommodations on board ship, via a reference to her straw hat. In the source text, Shand says to Caldigate, “‘Have you observed that woman in the brown straw hat?’” (JC 31); Caldigate replies, “‘She struck me as talking better than her gown, if you know what I mean’” (32). Trollope’s Victorian readers would have known exactly what Trollope means—that Mrs. Smith is a consummate actress, and she is acting above her second-class berth, believing she would be better suited in first class. Grennan consistently pictures Mrs. Smith in a ribbonless straw hat, but tilted in the manner of the Phiz and Frith depictions; we see her in this hat on the voyage out, in the diggings in Australia, and on her return to England to press bigamy charges. Only in the two panels where she gets into a fistfight with Caldigate at Ahalala does her trademark hat tumble to the ground (Grennan, D 52).

  Of particular interest, too, is Grennan’s decision to depict Mrs. Smith sailing back to Australia as the final wordless panel of the graphic novel, whereas the source text ends with the sentencing of Mrs. Smith to three years of hard labor for forgery (see fig. 53). Critic Janet Meyers reads this verdict as a defeat of the imperial project’s aim to make new identities available to emigrant women through colonization: “By making literal Mrs. Smith’s superfluous position in relation to the nation through her marginalization within the confines of a prison, Trollope implies that emigration, like transportation, had failed to stabilize the empire or to reform convicts or settlers” (142). Meyers also laments the defeat of Mrs. Smith as a character, noting Dick Shand can find “success in the colony as a partner on a sugar estate. For Euphemia Smith no such recuperation is possible, either in Britain or in Australia” (141).

  Grennan takes a more optimistic approach to Mrs. Smith’s fate. Grennan explains:

  Trollope also hints at respect for Mrs. Smith, in that, although she is described as degraded, vulgar and criminal by the end of the book, he makes no mention of the fate of the remainder of the £20K that Caldigate has given to her, Crinkett, Smith and Adamson. She is imprisoned with hard labour for fraud for three years, but the money awaits her/their release. She will exit prison a rich woman. So I sought to make Mrs. Smith’s position even more equivocal in Dispossession, plausibly having a jury acquit her of the envelope forgery as she continues to protest that she and Caldigate were married. The reader of Dispossession, as John Caldigate, never knows the truth of the matter. (Interview with Grennan)

  Figure 53. The final panel from Dispossession. Illustration by Simon Grennan for his Dispossession, 2015. London: Jonathan Cape, p. 100.

  The final wordless panel of a slyly smiling Mrs. Smith on board a ship—still wea
ring her faux innocent straw hat and red dress, but now draped in a fur wrap to indicate her presumed wealth—successfully translates Trollope’s equivocation. Mrs. Smith may suffer, as Trollope suggests in her reaction to her prison sentence in the source text, but there is no evidence that she will not ultimately come out victorious as Grennan elects to show her in the last plate.

  Critical and popular interest in this adaptation of John Caldigate even before its publication makes it intriguing to imagine graphic classics of more of Trollope’s forty-seven novels. John Everett Millais’s illustrations for Trollope’s works may prove as influential to graphic novel adaptations as the original illustrations of Oliver Twist and Alice in Wonderland already have.

  Oliver Twist and the Graphic Novel’s Reengagement with and Revision of a Persistent Caricature of Fagin the Jew

  Will Eisner contends in his introduction that Fagin the Jew (FTJ) “is not an adaptation of Oliver Twist! It is the story of Fagin the Jew” (FTJ 4). However, this graphic novel is a reimagining of Oliver Twist in which Fagin is the lead character. With the mission of humanizing a Jewish stereotype, Eisner gives Fagin a sympathetic past; parents, Abraham and Rachael; and a first name, Moses—names all drawn from the Old Testament. The first half of Fagin the Jew envisions the life of Dickens’s Fagin before the novel begins, and the second half adapts Oliver Twist from Fagin’s perspective.