Writing for The Guardian’s books blog, Ned Beauman expresses his disdain for comic-book adaptations of prose works — such as HarperCollins’ Agatha Christie Comic Strip imprint:
Particularly baffling are Classical Comics’ Plain Text and Quick Text versions of Shakespeare plays, in which characters speak in short sentences of one-syllable words. “If you’ve ever wanted to fully appreciate the works of Shakespeare but find the language rather cryptic, then this is the version for you!” This is like handing someone a vitamin pill and saying, “If you’ve ever wanted to fully appreciate a banana but find the peeling rather tricky, then this is the version for you!” Getting kids into Shakespeare is good, but if you’re going to go to such lengths to conceal what makes Shakespeare worth reading in the first place, what’s the point?
The best comics are nearly always the ones that tell a story that could not have been adequately told in any other medium. Straight adaptations are excluded by definition. What’s far more interesting is something like Alan Moore’s second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a sort of lunatic conspiracy theorist’s view of The War of the Worlds, or Neil Gaiman’s award-winning issue of Sandman in which a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is taken over by real imps and fairies. They’re not replacements for the originals, they’re irreverent tributes.
At the SLG Publishing blog, Editor-in-Chief Jennifer de Guzman acknowledges her own dislike for adaptations, but wonders whether film and comics are being held to different standards: “I … find it curious that Beauman thinks that graphic novel adaptations ought to change something about the source material. Is this an opinion widely held? It certainly is different from the standard criterion for judging movie adaptations of novels, which is the movies’ faithfulness to their sources.”
August 24th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Particularly baffling are Classical Comics’ Plain Text and Quick Text versions of Shakespeare plays, in which characters speak in short sentences of one-syllable words.
Not so baffling - try handing a kid who’s interested in fantasy a copy of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” or “The Tempest” and see if he picks up an interest in Shakespeare. Probably not - the plots of Shakespeare’s plays are mostly dead simple, but if you’re used to reading for plot, reading Shakespeare is a hard slog because of the language — even watching a performance can require you to think at multiple levels if you’re trying to figure out the plot and the characters and the language being use simultaneously - not a skill that most TV watchers are going to pick up. Having a handle on the plot and the characters in a Shakespeare play can help you get past that hurdle and actually get at the reason Shakespeare is enjoyable - the language and the very nice construction of the plays themselves. A comics adaptation that eliminates the language as a barrier COULD be a worthwhile enterprise to someone who just feels lost reading or even watching the bard’s work to get them up to speed so that they can actually enjoy it for what it is.
August 24th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Agreed, Jer. I believe it’s the same with Opera now, too, where the audience is encouraged to read a synopsis of each act beforehand so they know what is going on. Even the English works have this.
And Shakespeare knew full well that he had to appeal to the poor who paid to sit in the dirt to see what the aristocracy watched from the shade on chairs. Every so often the plot is put on hold for a fight or some form or ribaldry. The material is meant to appeal to a broad audience anyway, so I don’t see any harm in adapting it for neophytes.