An adaptation that thrives in its new medium.
Heavyweight comic book publisher Marvel envisions Stephen King’s seminal apocalyptic epic The Stand as six five-issue miniseries, collected here alongside a companion volume of creator interviews, production notes, script pages and original and supporting artwork.
Upon the release of The Stand’s expanded edition in 1990, Kirkus suggested King’s tale of good versus evil writ large (for the first time complete and uncut) had sprung from an imagination fed on comic books, and this new graphic homecoming (based on that 1990 edition) is a feverish wonder. Aguirre-Sacasa (Archie Meets Glee, 2013, etc.) divvies King’s sprawling novel into poetically economic blocks of text woven seamlessly across narration that gallops from the accidental release of a militarily engineered bioweapon known as Captain Trips, through the resulting phantsamagoria of plague, national decimation, widespread clairvoyance, crosscultural roadtripping and shaky-legged civil rebirth. The sprawling events crystalize into everyman Stu Redman’s damned love triangle with pregnant Fran Goldsmith and disturbed Harold Lauder; the Bildungsroman of rock star Larry Underwood, feauring Nadine Cross, the devil’s betrothed; deaf, mute and one-eyed wunderkind Nick Andros’ friendship with simpleminded secret weapon Tom Cullen; the anarchic inferno of Trashcan Man; the righteousness and inescapable humanity of Mother Abigail; and the ageless menace of Randall Flagg, aka the Walkin Dude, aka the Dark Man. As with much of King’s work, the story aches with the pathos of the damned, desperation and despair (and glimmers of hope) pulsing from a web of tortured relationships, so the swift pace of this visual translation is all the more impressive, thanks in no small part to how Perkins (House of M: Avengers, 2008, etc.) twists the creamy fullness of his figures and faces so that even conversations crackle with animation and silent expressions tremble with emotion. Of course, the story also provides ample opportunity to illustrate in engrossing detail decimating gunflights, prolonged decomposition, naked crucifixion, devastating explosions, demonic wolf and weasel attacks and Flagg’s overworldly abilities, including levatation and looking appropriately badass in a jean jacket. The overall effect is akin to operatic yet finite series such as Preacher, but without the zaniness and iconoclasm.
An adaptation that thrives in its new medium.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7851-5331-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2013
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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