Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  29. Potter studied with Miss Cameron from age twelve to age seventeen.

  30. On 6 March 1883, Potter mentions that Millais is using “Papa’s velveteen for a background and has torn it” (Linder, JBP 32), and we also learn the velvet comes from one of Beatrix Potter’s mother’s gowns.

  31. In “Natural History: A Scientist’s Eye,” Linda Lear, one of Potter’s biographers, likens Potter to a different eminent Victorian artist and critic closely associated with Millais: “Like the artist and critic John Ruskin, Potter understood that the only way to know something was to draw it. First the hand-lens, then the camera, and finally the microscope taught Potter how to ‘see’” (“Natural History” 455).

  32. Hobbs regrettably does not include her source.

  33. For more discussion, see my essay “Beatrix Potter: Naturalist Artist” where I demonstrate how many of Potter’s specialized nature studies reappear as illustrative details in the Peter Rabbit series.

  34. With her governesses, Potter visited the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the British Museum: Natural History (now the Natural History Museum).

  35. Potter brought her portfolio of over 250 drawings and watercolors of mushrooms and fungi to the botanists at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew, but the director, William Thiselton-Dyer, dismissed her work. Potter was a woman and considered too young (she was thirty at the time); worse, her drawings illustrated theories based on her own scientific experiments (for example, showing lichens to be dual organisms of fungi and algae) in advance of commonly held theories of the time. Potter’s rejection at Kew led her to search for other avenues to publish her watercolors. Illustration in the 1890s was an expanding field open to women (particularly of texts for women and children). Potter’s extensive nature studies of fungi, flowers, animals, and water life inform her work as a children’s book illustrator as I explore in my essay “Beatrix Potter: Naturalist Artist.”

  36. Potter’s drawings of humans are inferior to her skillful renderings of fauna, flora, and animals, as I have discussed in “Natural Companions: Text and Illustration in the Work of Beatrix Potter.” Potter’s illustrations of animal characters in lake, woodland, and garden settings provide natural history lessons for child readers.

  37. In Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, Marta McDowell lists gardens around London, the Lake District, Scotland, and Wales that feature in Beatrix Potter’s books.

  38. Linder and Linder include this watercolor in The Art of Beatrix Potter, 144; it appears in the section entitled “Microscopic Work and Drawings of Fungi.”

  39. Linder and Linder reprint “Hips” in the section named “Early Work” in The Art of Beatrix Potter, 18.

  40. “Squirrels on a Log” and several squirrel studies appear in Linder and Linder’s The Art of Beatrix Potter in a section entitled “Animal Studies,” 154–55.

  41. See Hobbs and Whalley’s Beatrix Potter: The V&A Collection for a detailed study entitled “Waterlilies: a close-up view of leaves and flowers amongst reeds,” appearing opposite 33.

  42. “Sketches of Frogs” is reproduced in Linder’s A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, 178. It is among the many natural history studies that Potter recalled for her book illustrations.

  43. This oft-cited anecdote appears, for example, in Linder’s A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, 178.

  44. Linder unfortunately does not indicate the source of Potter’s quote.

  45. The robin moves all about Mr. McGregor’s garden and witnesses Peter gorging on radishes, 21; searching for parsley to cure his stomachache, 23; losing “one of his shoes among the cabbages, and the other shoe amongst the potatoes” (29); becoming “out of breath and trembling with fright” (42) after losing his jacket (and narrowly escaping Mr. McGregor by jumping out a window, knocking over three plants in the process); and losing all his clothes and shoes to “a scare-crow to frighten the blackbirds” (53).

  46. Potter demonstrates a clear understanding of bird anatomy—feathers, bill, and underside—in her 1902 “Studies of a Dead Thrush ‘Picked up in the snow’” in the section entitled “Animal Studies” in Linder and Linder’s The Art of Beatrix Potter, 178.

  47. According to Henry James, Du Maurier most admired Millais, Walker, and Leech, in that order; see James’s 1897 article “George Du Maurier” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 600.

  48. I have previously argued that Du Maurier used psychic phenomena in his fiction as a vehicle to achieve his unrealized aspirations. See my essay “Turning Life into Literature: The Romantic Fiction of George Du Maurier” in The CEA Critic.

  49. For more discussion of Trilby and the bestseller system of publishing, see Edward L. Purcell’s “Trilby and Trilby-Mania. The Beginning of the Best Seller System,” published in The Journal of Popular Culture.

  50. Thrilby features a mesmerist who hypnotizes tables and chairs, and Biltry burlesgues Du Maurier’s illustrations as well as the text.

  51. Svengali is also the name of Richard Walton Tully’s silent 1922 and talking 1931 film versions of Trilby. See Richard Kelly, George Du Maurier, 121–23, for a full discussion of Trilbymania. Ibbetson also had a popular following—it became an opera in 1931 and, like Trilby, gave rise to a popular motion picture, featuring Gary Cooper as Peter Ibbetson. However, film versions of Trilby have continued into the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A loosely adapted remake called Svengali came out in 1983, turning the Trilby character into a pop star named Zoe, and a 2013 film, also called Svengali, transforms the eponymous protagonist into a go-getting manager of a Welsh rock band; neither adaptation has a Jewish villain, as Louise McDonald discusses in “Softening Svengali,” 238–41.

  52. In the 1880s and 1890s, automatic writing and mesmerism filled the pages of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Du Maurier gives the topic a supernatural twist by allowing Martia to write through Josselin during his sleep; the plot grows even stranger when the martian reincarnates herself as Barty’s daughter Marty.

  53. Rosenberg makes an explicit connection between Cruikshank’s drawing of Fagin and Du Maurier’s Svengali in From Shylock to Svengali (235). Kerker begins his examination of villainy derived from Jewishness by defining “shylock,” “fagin,” and “Svengali” as noted in the 2004 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary; he concludes that “With Shylock, Fagin and Svengali, the images have so taken hold that Webster was able to incorporate them as common nouns into the English language” (Kerker). In “‘Dirty Pleasure’: Trilby’s Filth,” Joseph Bristow associates Svengali with Fagin: “In obvious ways, Svengali conforms to the loathsome habits of his equally maligned literary forebear, the sexually exploitative Fagin of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist” (161).

  54. Rosenberg offers a lengthy description of the resemblance between Fagin and Svengali that extends from their unkempt hair, beaked noses, bushy eyebrows, Hapsburg lips, and long and bony fingers. After this convincing comparison, he ironically adds, “all similarities disappear. No such creature as Fagin ever trod the boards of the Adelphi” (235).

  55. Deborah Heller in a book chapter on “The Outcast as Villain and Victim” notes that “Fagin embodies many characteristics long associated with Jews in English literature, particularly dramatic literature: he is dishonest, thieving, treacherous, avaricious, and ultimately cowardly” (41); Susan Meyer echoes this critique but adds to this list effeminacy and obsequiousness in “Antisemitism and Social Critique in Dickens’s ‘Oliver Twist’” (239). Lauriat Lane pinpoints stage convention in “Dickens’ Archetypal Jew,” noting, “Fagin is, of course, more than ‘the conventional stage-Jew.’ But it is true that stage convention provided some of the raw materials from which Dickens fashioned his highly symbolic figure” (95).

  56. Du Maurier did not give a pronounced nose to all Jewish people, nor are all his Jews villainous. In Peter Ibbetson, the antagonist Uncle Ibbetson has a taint of Jewish and African blood, but not a Semitic nose, and Jewish Leah Gibson, wh
o Barty Josselin marries in The Martian, is a stunning, statuesque woman. But the drawings of Svengali have the kind of pronounced nose that characterizes Cruikshank’s depiction of Fagin. Even if Du Maurier in part based Svengali on his Jewish friend Felix Moscheles from his days in Gleyre’s atelier, he altered Moscheles’s appearance and drew him with a hooked nose (Moscheles’s friends, in contrast, found his prominent nose handsome). Laura Vorachek in “Mesmerists and Other Meddlers” posits that a Du Maurier cartoon entitled “Hypnotism—A Modern Parisian Romance” in Punch’s Almanack for 1890 might be an early model for Svengali. “While the doctor is not explicitly described as Jewish in the text,” Vorachek notes, “he does have the same large nose that Du Maurier will later draw on Svengali” (208). Edmund Wilson observes in a chapter on “The Jews” in A Piece of My Mind that although he has not found any evidence that Du Maurier himself had Jewish blood, “in each of his three novels a rather unexpected Jewish theme plays a more or less important role” (103).

  57. Fagin’s prominent nose, which marks him as a Semitic Jew, even extends beyond his jutting chin in “Fagin in the Condemned Cell” (see fig. 16, ch. 2, 75).

  58. In George Du Maurier, Kelly also suggests this illustration shows “the influence of Hieronymus Bosch in his nightmare cartoons depicting a two-headed monster, men smoking out of their own brain pans, and a black spider with a human head” (155).

  59. To Kelly, “Svengali emerges as a mythic character, one that transcends individual personalities and stands even today as an embodiment of a controlling evil genius” (George Du Maurier 116–17). In the introduction to their 2016 essay collection, George Du Maurier: Illustrator, Author, Critic Beyond Svengali, 1, Simon Cooke and Paul Goldman advance that Du Maurier’s enigmatic character has eclipsed the multi-faceted career of this important nineteenth-century novelist, critic, and illustrator.

  60. I recommend Garrett Stewart’s “Reading Figures: The Legible Image of Victorian Textuality,” which examines how the photograph of Svengali that Trilby receives after his death leads to her demise; his reading informs this discussion.

  Conclusion: The Victorian Graphic Classics—Heir of the Victorian Illustrated Book

  1. For The Graphic Canon, editor Russ Kick commissioned talented artists to adapt excerpts of classics from the western canon, ranging from the Bible and The Odyssey to The Stranger to show “a good deal of what comic art and illustration are capable of” (2: xii).

  2. Maxwell suggests the following are twentieth-century incarnations of the illustrated book: art presses, artists’ books, Joseph Cornell’s boxes (that approximate illustration but move outside the space of the book), and other “modernist objects that recall the form of the book but are not exactly books in themselves” (395). Maxwell’s interests lie in the “modernist/surrealist experiment in reconstructing the Victorian illustrated book” (411), such as art by Max Ernst, and post–World War II work of Edward Gorey, Tom Phillips, and Joseph Cornell. Maxwell draws parallels, for example, between a Cornell box and a chapter from Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

  3. “Sequential art,” a term that Eisner popularized to define the medium of comics, is “A train of images deployed in sequence” (Eisner, Comics 6). Building upon Eisner’s definition of “sequential art,” Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics describes comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (9), a definition that reveals the interchangeability of the terms “comics” and “sequential art.” To compound the difficulty of definition, McCloud suggests that Roldolpfe Töpffer, the father of “comics,” was “neither artist nor writer—had created and mastered a form that was at once both and neither. A language all its own” (17).

  4. “Reading in the pure literary sense was mugged on its way to the 21st century by the electronic media,” notes Will Eisner in Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, and electronic media “influenced and changed the way we read” (5). “‘Those accustomed to scanning regular columns of type often have difficulty assimilating the haphazard captions in comics at the same time as jumping from image to image,’” as Paul Gravett recognizes (qtd. in Eisner, Graphic 4)

  5. To Tabachnick, while viewing a film, one cannot linger over a passage or review it again, as one can in reading a book or a graphic novel. In “The Graphic Novel and the Age of Transition,” Tabachnick adds: “unlike film or drama, the graphic novel can be seen as the attempt of the physical book to survive in an electronic age by combining the advantages of the traditional reading experience with those of the computer screen, which often provides visual objects alongside text” (2).

  6. The graphic classics genre differs from illustrated editions of books that appeared without illustrations and had pictures later “grafted onto” them (Harvey 180). For example, the 1894 Peacock edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice illustrated by Hugh Thomson and the 1943 Random House edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg appeared decades after the novels, both originally published without illustrations.

  7. Harvey’s use of the word “design” here is curious; it would be more accurate to say that the novelist often determined which scenes would benefit from illustration while writing the monthly parts.

  8. More rare in the graphic novel field is the kind of enduring partnership that Dickens sustained with Hablot Knight Browne, who illustrated ten of Dickens’s works over a span of fifteen years. English comic book artist Dave Gibbons memorably collaborated with Alan Moore for the twelve-issue series Watchmen and “For the Man Who Has Everything,” a Superman story. In a 2014 interview with Hayley Campbell, Gaiman explains that the creative process with an artist “‘is very much a collaboration. If we put it in terms of a movie, I would be the writer, the director and often in some ways the editor. And they get to be the cameraman and all the actors’” (qtd. in Campbell).

  9. Some illustrators like Cruikshank were also etchers and engravers and other artist/illustrators like Rossetti relied on the Dalziel brothers to engrave their illustrations; likewise, some graphic artists like John Burns ink and color, others work only in pencil and rely on a colorist and inker, and some like Will Eisner create graphics and text.

  10. Will Eisner popularized the term “graphic novel” to describe his semiautobiographical collection of four interrelated stories about immigrant life in New York City in the 1930s, particularly Jewish immigrants. Most critics consider A Contract with God (1978) the first modern graphic novel. Named after Eisner, the Eisner Awards, founded in 1998, go to adaptors, artists, letterers, inkers, and critics across a wide range of categories in the comics medium as well as to educators and academics who specialize in this field.

  11. The history of comic books deserves separate, in-depth study. Most timelines of Western comic history include publications like France’s Le charivari and England’s Punch as well as artists like Switzerland’s Rodolphe Töpffer and Germany’s Wilhelm Busch. The contributions of Belgian artist Frans Masereel and American artist Lynd Ward—whose wordless novels, respectively, Passionate Journey (1919) and God’s Man (1929) are composed entirely of sequential woodcuts—have escaped classification as comics, but the work of both artists demonstrates the potential of the comic book form. For the starting point of American comics, most critics designate the year 1896 and “The Yellow Kid,” the main comic strip character in Richard Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley.

  12. Scott McCloud, Stephen Tabachnick, and other comics’ critics align the birth of modern comics with Töpffer. Like the first generation of caricaturist illustrators, Töpffer was influenced by the same British satirical artists who presented work in sequence—principally William Hogarth, who created successive visual panels like The Rake’s Progress (ca. 1733–35) to narrate a moral story of the road to sin; Thomas Rowlandson, who designed illustrations to accompany William Combe’s popular Tours of Doctor Syntax series (1812, 1820, 1821); and James Gillray, a political cartoonist famously known for John Bull’s Progress (1793).

  13. “The soph
istication of the picture-story did grow” from its origins in cave painting and hieroglyphics (a trail Scott McCloud follows in Understanding Comics), “reaching great heights in the nimble hands of William Hogarth” (McCloud 16).

  14. The graphic novel is often a compilation of a series of comic books published individually—sometimes as few as three or four issues or as many as twelve or more.

  15. “For much of this century,” McCloud likewise argues in Understanding Comics, “the word ‘comics’ has had such negative connotations that many of comics’ most devoted practitioners have preferred to be known as ‘illustrators,’ ‘commercial artists’ or, at best, ‘cartoonists’!” (18).

  16. Likewise, in Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner notes, “for reasons having much to do with usage, subject matter and perceived audience, sequential art was for many decades generally ignored as a form worthy of scholarly discussion” (xi).

  17. Russian-born immigrant Albert Lewis Kanter (1897–1973) began the Classical Comics/Classics Illustrated series in 1941 with an adaption of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), followed by comic book adaptations of works by, among others, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott, Herman Melville, and William Shakespeare. The sales figures seem high by today’s standards, but such figures were then commonplace for the most popular books and comics. This series never aimed to replace the classics or interpret them with sophistication, as we find in graphic novel adaptations today by, for example, Classical Comics. Classics Illustrated, dubbed “Classics Desecrated” (Gravett, Graphic Novels 185) by many educators, was published in 26 languages and sold in 36 countries. The series aimed for brevity—titles were reduced from 64 to 56 to 48 pages given rising paper costs while the price of the publication increased from 10 cents to 15 cents and eventually to 25 cents. Not surprisingly, the line’s competitors, cheap paperback editions and Cliff’s Notes (now CliffsNotes), led to its demise. Papercutz explicitly bills itself as a “modern reboot” of Kanter’s Classics Illustrated.