Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works ed. by Stephen E. Tabachnick, Saltzman, Esther Bendit

Abstract

Reviewed by: Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works ed. by Stephen E. Tabachnick, Saltzman, Esther Bendit Edward Brunner Tabachnick, Stephen E., and Saltzman, Esther Bendit, eds. Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2015. 283pp. $45.00 paperback. Readers who appreciated Stephen Tabachnick’s words as guest editor of Studies in the Novel in fall 2015, proposing that the “graphic novel is capable of treating any subject that is within the purview of the best literature and art not only with the same level of artistry, but with the exciting addition of innovative techniques” (290), will find that affirmation tested through a focus on adaptation studies in these essays collected and edited by Tabachnick and Esther Bendit Saltzman. Graphic novels, as media products that combine verbal and visual formats that painters and novelists tend to keep separate, are predisposed to work interactively, so engaging with predecessor texts is not unfamiliar work. For scholars to study, then, graphic novels as they reproduce, transform, or imitate literary writings is not an unusual turn but one that is positively intriguing. The collection’s tutelary spirit is Linda Hutcheon whose A Theory of Adaptation offered a capacious description of adaptation as a process that includes three accumulative traits. At their most basic, adaptations operate to link a new work to an older work in a way that remains “recognizable”; in more intricate versions, adaptations reveal a new work as a “creative and interpretive act” that engages with a prior text; and finally, most intricate of all, adaptations develop surprising interrelations between products that affirm “an extended intertextual engagement” (Hutcheon 8). The fourteen essays in Drawn from the Classics find examples that explore all these options. Individual essayists take up writings that span The Odyssey to Ray Bradbury and offer comments on versions of Beowulf, Othello, various tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Moby-Dick, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Emma Bovary, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, The Metamorphosis, and The Great Gatsby, as well as two lesser-known pieces: Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Though we are a long way from the Classics Illustrated series of the 1940s and 1950s that always ended by urging readers to investigate the original, several essayists offer descriptions with a useful pedagogical slant, and these consider the kind of adaptations Hutcheon might call “recognizable.” J. Caitlin Finlayson ponders graphic novel versions of the scene depicting Othello suffocating Desdemona that fail to capture the sexual violence in Shakespeare, possibly to spare the sensibilities of a young audience. This is a problem that some classrooms might take up as a talking point. By contrast, Derek Parker Royal locates Poe stories “particularly suited to translate, and even transcend, the conventions in which Poe writes” (60), and he even finds literary terms—“romantic irony” and “ambiguity”—to be useful descriptors. Short stories slip most gracefully from print culture into graphics art, as is evident [End Page 255] in Darren Harris-Fain’s tracing of Ray Bradbury’s writings from a first appearance in EC Comics in the 1950s to large-scale productions legitimated by Bradbury, who oversaw them. But adaptations of The Odyssey hold commercial appeal, too, reading “much like a superhero comic of the mid to late 20th century” (19), Paul D. Streufert convincingly argues, describing episodes involving Circe and Polyphemus as demonstrating the “social disconnection” that marks supervillains. By contrast, in reviewing versions of Beowulf Jason Tondro finds adaptations that vary widely, with at least one “firmly rooted in anthropological and archeological detail” (38) but another verging on decisions made for largely-commercial reasons, the prequel series entitled Kid Beowulf. When Dirk Vanderbeke confronts multiple versions of Moby-Dick so different they transform Melville’s novel “into an open metaphor,” we near adaptations that exemplify Hutcheon’s second major trait, engagements both “interpretive and creative.” This group of essays, then, more freely questions the success of adaptations that move toward balancing interpretation and creativity. Ahab becomes an icon, as Vanderbeke successfully argues, no less identifiable and malleable than Batman. More successful creative-and-interpretive mixes hinge on...