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
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
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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