Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  The 2012 Papercutz adaptation of Oliver Twist, written by Loïc Dauvillier and illustrated by Olivier Deloye, is the longest and most complete retelling of these Oliver Twist graphic classics at 238 pages.51 Deloye makes Fagin a caricature of a Semitic Jew. Fagin’s enormous sausage-shaped nose—often reddened, hooked, and swollen (for example, Dauvillier 98)—dominates Papercutz’s rendition of “Fagin in the Condemned Cell” (237). The illustration is recognizable to the viewer familiar with the original although this version loses nearly all of the psychological intensity of Cruikshank’s illustration owing to the ridiculousness of Fagin’s sausage nose. Also gone are the shackles and the biting of the hand, but Deloye recalls the intense fear in the eyes of Fagin, who sits alone in his empty cell.

  The panel has no word balloons or captions. Deloye includes the cot and the barred window from the Cruikshank original, although he reverses the placement of the cot (in this version it is on the same side as the window). As in Eisner’s drawing, Deloye’s Fagin sits on the floor of the barren cell. The walls in the Papercutz version are bare—gone are the sheriff’s notices from Cruikshank’s design. Deloye includes a detail that recalls James Mahoney’s version for the Household Edition (see fig. 36B, ch. 3, 135); not initials, but the names of two previous inmates on death row are scratched into the prison wall. This detail foreshadows Fagin’s fate, anticipated in the next three frames: a guard gestures to Fagin to leave his cell; an angry crowd yells at Fagin (“Hang Him!” “Child-Killer!” “Thief!” “Murderer!”); and the hangman commands Fagin to climb up the scaffold (“This Way, You!” [Dauvillier 127]).

  Campfire and Papercutz also dramatically reengage Cruikshank’s iconic staging of the starvation of the workhouse children in “Oliver Asking for More” (see fig. 8, ch. 2, 57). Johnson and Nagulakonda exacerbate Dickens’s attack on the parish workhouse system. In the source text, the branch workhouse run by Mrs. Mann seems relatively innocuous—Oliver even asks if Mrs. Mann will come with him when he moves to the parish workhouse. In Campfire’s adaptation, Mrs. Mann calls the orphans “brats” (Johnson 6) and threatens them: “And the next time you complain about being hungry, I’ll lock you all in the coal cellar!” (6).52 Taunts follow Oliver to the parish workhouse where the board reminds orphan Oliver to “say your prayers every night, and pray for the people who feed you and take care of you” (8)—ironic words since no one cares for Oliver or feeds him very much.

  Through eight sequential panels, we witness Oliver’s starvation at the workhouse; the drawing of lots to see who must ask for more gruel; Oliver’s famous request, “Please, sir. I want some more” (Johnson 9);53 and the parish board’s response to “that troublemaker” (10). Like Mahoney (see fig. 35B, ch. 3, 133), Nagulakonda reverses the orientation of the original Cruikshank illustration (see fig. 35A, ch. 3, 133) by placing the backdrop of starving workhouse children to Oliver’s left. Close-ups of the malnourished orphans also fill two horizontal frames positioned above the three-panel sequence in which Oliver asks for more and is beaten by the large, pot-bellied master of the workhouse, who is wielding the very spoon he uses to ladle the meager gruel. Nagulakonda intensifies Oliver’s suffering by the hands of the corrupt workhouse system in depicting the cook’s violent reaction to Oliver’s polite request for “more” (see fig. 56). Motion lines in the third of the three-panel sequence dramatize the force of the master’s impending blow, knocking Oliver’s bowl, which bleeds off the page. The master has glaring white teeth, poised as if to eat Oliver Twist, and coarse diction (“What? Why you little—” [Johnson 9]). Oliver in the third panel of the sequence is posed dramatically on his knees; he closes his eyes in fear and raises his hands in a protective gesture to ward off the impending blows.

  The 2012 Papercutz adaptation54 also revisits “Oliver Asking for More,” but in this adaptation, Oliver has a more authoritative voice, of consequence since the eponymous character is undeveloped in Dickens’s source text. The scene unfolds over thirty panels. There is no drawing of lots, but Oliver utters his famous request to the master, who in this version is eating a hearty meal at a table with the other parish officials. The master throws Oliver into a dark cell. In three subsequent consecutive panels, Dauvillier and Deloye augment Oliver’s character when he cries, “Open Up! I want out!”; “I didn’t do anything!”; “Open up!” (Dauvillier 22). Cries and exclamation marks intensify Oliver’s justified outburst against the cruel parish authorities, but the letters in each of the three word balloons get progressively smaller. Diminishing font size is a convention of graphic novel format to decrease forcefulness, in this case of Oliver’s power. But Oliver’s brief protest prepares the reader for a subsequent scene in the source text where “Oliver Plucks up a Spirit” to defend his dead mother’s honor.55

  Figure 56. “Oliver Asking for More.” Artwork by Rajesh Nagulakonda for Dan Johnson’s adaptation of Oliver Twist, 2011. © Campfire 2014.

  Whereas Eisner’s adaptation targets the persistent stereotype of Fagin, the other two adaptations dramatize sensational and sordid elements of the source text not illustrated by Cruikshank. Johnson and Nagulakonda develop Nancy’s character as a battered woman in the Campfire adaptation. In the source text, Sikes threatens, controls, and kills Nancy, traits that we associate with a male batterer. In this adaptation, Sikes also beats her. Nancy confides to Oliver: “I have promised that you will be quiet and silent. If you are not, you will not only harm yourself, you will harm me too. See here! This is what I have done for you already! Remember this, and don’t let me suffer more for you just now” (Johnson 38). The graphics show Nancy lowering her cloak to reveal three prominent cuts and part of a fourth on her upper arm. Nancy’s expressive eyes register pain and fear that Sikes will soon strike her again.56

  Johnson and Nagulakonda’s depiction of Sikes as a batterer brings to the foreground Dickens’s advocacy for abused women in Oliver Twist, written long before this taboo topic came to be recognized as a social problem demanding redress. Prostitution was on the rise in Victorian England, and in the mid 1840s, Dickens assisted Angela Burdett-Coutts in setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women called Urania Cottage, a safe house for those who wanted a fresh start. This graphic novel adaptation makes vivid Dickens’s subtext of protest against domestic abuse well over a century before this term or “battered woman’s syndrome” entered our language.

  Nagulakonda also develops the underlying sensuality of the source text in the scene where Sikes confronts Nancy for her alleged betrayal and murders her. In the source text, Sikes pulls back the bed curtains and wakens Nancy, who is “half-dressed” and exhibits “an expression of pleasure at his return” (OT, Oxf. 1982 302). Dickens distracts the reader from this glint of arousal with Nancy’s murder that swiftly follows. In this adaptation, however, we see a sensual-looking Nancy with a coy smile on her face as she awakes and realizes, “Bill … it is you—” (Johnson 75). Nancy looks as if she is expecting sex, but Sikes is there to kill her; true to Dickens’s text, Sikes responds to Nancy brusquely, “Get up!” (75). The command appears in a jagged-edged word balloon, a visual effect that intensifies his rage. In the next two panels, Sikes threatens and then throttles Nancy as she attempts to speak the exact words from the source text—“I have been true to you. Upon my guilty soul I have” (75). Cruikshank does not provide an illustration of Nancy’s murder, and Dickens gives just enough detail to make the murder theatrical; this was one of the scenes that Dickens often chose for his dramatic readings. Whereas Mahoney drew the aftermath of the murder scene for the Household Edition of Dickens (see fig. 37, ch. 3, 138), Nagulakonda shows the murder itself. A close-up panel of Sikes throttling Nancy and another of a smoking gun in Sikes’s hand (he shoots her in this adaptation) convincingly mark him a “murderer,” as Dickens calls Sikes right after Bill Sikes kills Nancy (OT, Oxf. 1982, 303).57

  In the Papercutz adaptation of Oliver Twist, Dauvillier and Deloye present Nancy’s murder in a sequence that covers more than three full pages of the gr
aphic novel. All the panels are darkly lit, creating a menacing tone for the moment when Sikes takes his lover’s life. Word balloons are at a minimum in this sequence of panels, and the few words that do appear are mainly vocalizations of screaming and beating: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH” (Dauvillier 212), and “WHAM” (213) and “NO! BILL! NO!” (213). These sound effects function additively to the graphics, providing a soundtrack of horror. Mimicking the savagery in Dickens’s characterization of Bill Sikes (for example, Sikes “growled out these words” [OT, Oxf. 1982 76]), Deloye carries such beastiality into Sikes’s glaring white teeth, jutting chin, and clenched fist, gripping a weapon ready to strike Nancy down (Sikes assaults Nancy with a pistol in the source text). Three adjacent vertical panels are staged to theatrical effect (Dauvillier 213). Sikes in one frame seizes a piece of wood, raises it high above his head in the second, and then in the third frame clubs Nancy, who exudes terror through her facial expression, body posture, and scream.

  Even more dramatic is the page that follows the murder. This page is comprised of four wordless, stacked horizontal panels (see fig. 57). In the first panel, Bull’s-eye cowers as he sniffs at a pool of bright red blood on the floor; this is Nancy’s blood, and the eyes of Bull’s-eye register fear. The next panel focuses on Sikes’s shoes and trouser legs covered with Nancy’s blood. Sikes is standing in a pool of bright red blood that also spatters the wall of the room. These details realize Dickens’s description of “the body—mere flesh and blood, no more—but such flesh, and so much blood!” (OT, Oxf. 1982 304). All four horizontal panels graphically show “so much blood!” In the third panel, Sikes’s bloody hand holds the gory murder weapon. The bottom panel chillingly closes in on Nancy’s bloodied hand clasping a now bloodied handkerchief with Rose Maylie’s name written upon it in cursive.

  The white handkerchief alludes to a key scene in Oliver Twist: Rose, described as Nancy’s “sister-woman” in an initial heading for chapter 40,58 offers to help Nancy escape to safety, but Nancy requests only a token from Rose, her white handkerchief. In Dickens’s source text, a martyred Nancy

  staggered and fell: nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief—Rose Maylie’s own—and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker. (OT, Oxf. 1982 303)

  Using a montage effect, Deloye embeds the words “Rose Maylie”; elegantly embroidered on the white handkerchief, Rose’s name makes palpable the “sister-woman” connection and Nancy’s true nature. The close-up of Nancy’s bloodied hand, a visual synecdoche for the bloodied corpse, paints the horror of “mere flesh and blood, no more” (304) that we imagine in our mind’s eye from the source text. Deloye fixes our eyes on the blood-spattered white handkerchief, a symbol of Nancy’s original innocence that is perverted by a life on the streets with Fagin and Sikes.

  Figure 57. “Nancy’s Murder.” Artwork by Olivier Deloye for Loïc Dauvillier’s adaptation of Oliver Twist, 2012. © Papercutz.

  In these graphic novel adaptations of Oliver Twist, we see an engagement with the theatrical aspects of the caricature school of illustration as well as the designs of many of the original illustrations, but none of these adaptations is merely reiterative. The panels devoted to the murder of Nancy, a scene too indelicate for the sensibilities of a Victorian middle-class readership, shed light upon Sikes’s brutality and Nancy’s saintliness that Mahoney hints at in depicting the murder’s aftermath (see fig. 37, ch. 3, 138). All three graphic novel adaptations bring to the foreground the indelible mark of the caricaturist in the presentation of Fagin, the villainous Jew that Nagulakonda and Deloye perpetuate and Eisner remediates. Eisner’s adaptation quintessentially demonstrates how crucial the original illustrations are to Oliver Twist. More than the other adaptors, Eisner set out to revise Fagin’s racialized physical appearance established by Cruikshank as well as his devious character created by Dickens.

  Graphic Alice and the Reengagement of Two Schools of Illustration: Caricature and Realism

  Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has captured the attention of sequential artists more than any other Victorian illustrated book. Mark Burstein in Alice in Comicland aligns Carroll and the Alice books with the comic book tradition since Carroll “was very much alive during the time of the development of proto-comics, and can himself be considered a progenitor” (9). Carroll’s juvenilia The Rectory Umbrella (a family magazine dating to about 1850) includes a cartoon entitled “The Scanty Meal”; in it, Carroll uses a staple of the graphic novel format, a word balloon with a long tail, to satirize The Scanty Meal (1847), a painting by the distinguished Victorian equine artist J. F. Herring.59 To Craig Yoe, editor of Alice in Comicland,

  Carroll had Alice think one of the greatest defenses of comic books/graphic novels before the form was even fully realized. Alice sits on the bank and ponders, “What is the use of a book … without pictures or conversations?” Absolutely nothing! And comics go beyond even the appeal and power of a profusely illustrated book like Alice in Wonderland. (17)

  In addition to the many film versions, photo shoots, and merchandise surrounding Alice, comic book parodies of Alice appear as early as Jack Davis’s adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for MAD Magazine in 1954 and continue most recently into a host of Alice erotica and Alice spin-offs. Zenescope’s 2012 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for the Grimm Fairy Tales series follows Alice, now a grown up sex magnet, as she returns to Wonderland. Hatter M.: The Looking Glass Wars trilogy, launched in 2010 by Automatic Pictures Publishing, reinterprets Carroll’s classic from the vantage point of the enigmatic Mad Hatter. Yoe favors the free, fanciful, and outlandish adaptations of Alice over the “‘straight’” (20) versions. But the faithful graphic novel adaptations by Dynamite and Campfire Classics reveal how graphic artists have built upon Carroll’s original caricatures that Tenniel redrew with realism, translating the Victorian illustrated book into a fresh hybrid textual-visual medium for a new generation of reader-viewers.

  Dynamite first issued The Complete Alice in Wonderland serially as four separate comic books published from 2009 to 2010 and then printed it as one book, following publication of the fourth installment. The first two issues adapt Wonderland, and the latter two adapt its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. A feature entitled “Creating Wonderland” in the first issue offers insight into the collaborative partnership of scriptwriters Leah Moore and John Reppion and graphic artist Érica Awano as well as the importance of the original text and illustrations to the adaptation process. Moore and Reppion advise Awano to incorporate details in the panel where Alice falls down the rabbit hole to “prefigure the rest of the story” (n. pag.). A comparison of the sketch and finished version of this particular panel reveals how Awano has added a portrait of the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, playing cards, red roses, and other props that hint at Alice’s adventures to come. Moore and Reppion also direct Awano to Tenniel’s landmark illustrations for “further reference or inspiration” and to the 1907 illustrations of Arthur Rackham to draw upon the “darkness of his drawings” and their “sense of menace” (n. pag.).60 Moore and Reppion include many of the famous lines from Alice, such as “I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye feet!” (n. pag.), although they regrettably delete Carroll’s famous credo, “‘what is the use of a book … without pictures or conversations?’” (AA 11). Moore and Reppion recommend a palette to the colorist that is “very old fashioned looking” to make the panels resemble “hand tinted Victorian photographs” (n. pag.) and capture the feel of the era.

  In contrast, Campfire’s 2010 graphic novel adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, scripted by Lewis Helfand with graphics by Rajesh Nagulakonda, uses vivid colors that make Alice’s adventures look bright and contemporary rather than Victorian but includes Carroll’s famous credo about pictures
and conversations (“What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?” [Helfand 5]). Nagulakonda’s graphics are more caricature-like than Awano’s realistic illustrations and less successful in capturing Carroll’s social caricatures of the White Rabbit (a Victorian gentleman/rabbit) and the Mock Turtle (a hybrid calf/turtle), both of which Tenniel expertly rendered for Wonderland. Nonetheless, the Dynamite and Campfire Classics adaptations recall and refashion illustrations that Tenniel drew or redrew from Carroll’s designs in both small and significant ways and use graphic novel format to animate Alice’s adventures and her bodily transformations.

  Awano and Nagulakonda both follow Tenniel’s conception of the playing cards as costumed figures in granting them human heads above their playing card bodies, making possible the Red Queen’s threat to behead them. Although Alice is blonde in both adaptations, and Awano slightly changes Alice’s hairstyle (giving her bangs), Alice in both graphic novel adaptations wears a blue pinafore dress and white stockings, a fashion that Tenniel trademarked. Both versions recall specific illustrations designed by Carroll and redrawn by Tenniel, such as Alice outgrowing the White Rabbit’s house. Awano also expertly carries forward the pantomimic aspects of Tenniel’s illustrations, such as of the Fish-Footman delivering an oversized letter to the Frog-Footman; Awano’s creatures possess human-looking bodies and large heads and look as if they are wearing animal masks such as in a pantomime, much as Tenniel imagined them.