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Introduction
Chris Reyns-Chikuma and Hugo Frey
Adaptation studies have commonly privileged the movement of literature into cinema as a prime subject of concern. A dominant part of this process has been to explain the mediation of a story from one medium to another by way of variations between faithfulness and originality. The debate is therefore commonly set out based on the following premises. (i) the movement of narrative from an ‘older’ form to a new technology; (ii) the shift from a static and predominantly text based field (the novel) to the very different immersive audio-visual space of cinema; and (iii) an evaluative analysis around questions of authenticity. Each of these features carry with them some implicit ideological assumptions (here we mean ideology very much with a small ‘i’): that adaptation is about expansion from a traditional site of culture to a new medium; that it is about the realization in image and sound of an existing ‘read only’ format, and that reader response is determined by understandings of fidelity and infidelity to source material. We exaggerate of course. However, it is also the case that any review of the migrations from ‘graphic narrative’ (comics and graphic novels) to the contemporary novel can and does indeed sometimes echo a well-worn cultural path. If what constitutes a great filmic adaptation is either authenticity or originality, what constitutes a ‘great’ novelization of a comic, shares some of the assumption sketched in very generally above. Thus, we can suggest that Frederic Tuten’s appropriation of Tintin in his novel Tintin in the New World (1993) is powerful because of its maximal originality-difference from its source; in cultural terms radical infidelity can be as rewarding as any dogged loyalty to an existing codification. Not that it is one-way traffic here. Note then
too how MichaelChabon’s Kavalier and Clay (2000) gains from its close appreciation of the history of the
comic books, as well as the life and work of Will Eisner. Moreover, for many readers of comics and novels it would be simply absurd for a character or storyworld to alter too greatly because of a format change.
Nonetheless, what is made very clear in the articles gathered together in this special issue of ‘Image [&]
Narrative’, is that existing literature to film adaptation models do not apply in any simple way to discussions
of ‘comics into novels’; and certainly, a great deal of rethinking is valuable. Grosso modo, the story of how novels are developed out of comics inverts several of the truisms of a certain kind of now traditional adaptation studies that we rehearsed in our opening paragraphs above. Thus, when one analyses ‘comics to novels’ a whole new set of concerns suddenly jump up in relevance. Notably, (i) matters of temporality and history alter from classic adaptation study since now it is a case of the younger medium transitioning back into the older form. However, a little paradoxically, it is the older form of the novel that is seeking renewal. (Comics, maybe because they are so ubiquitous, quasi-vernacular, do not need and have little to gain from, literary fiction’s interest; moreover, the graphic novel is already carving out respectability for graphic narrative, for well over thirty years now). (ii) Instead of an additional or supplementary rhetorical device (the addition of filmic images to novels’ texts) the transition of comics into novels is about a withdrawal or absence of a device, images/panel-page layouts. It is an exchange from ‘text and image’ to text and paratext, though of course illustrated novels provide an interesting hybrid, that we will return to later herein. (iii) Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, establishing an exchange from a medium that accepts multiple versions of the stories it tells (comics usually run episodically for many years without end; and are products of teams of multiple writers and artists) into the
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world of traditional letters where original – pure - authorship continues to be of primary concern, has its effects. This collection of essays is the first academic one directly addressing issues of adaptation/transfer from comics to novel and poetry. The eight articles are only a beginning of, what we hope, would be a long dialogue including many other narratives not analyzed or even mentioned here by authors such as Jay Cantor (Krazy Kat, 1987), Stephen Fink (Further adventures, 1990), Tom de Haven, Thomas Pynchon, Dave Eggers, Chip Kidd, Jon, Jerome Charyn, Carrie Vaughn, … and artists who are also novelists like Alan Moore, Joann Sfar, Harry Morgan (Alias Christian Wahl), Willy Mouele, Ludovic Debeurme, José-Louis Bocquet, Benoît Peeters, …What many of the contributors do underline here is reading comics-to-lit adaptations sheds in fact some fresh light on some wider assumptions of the field. Thus, in “La novellisation des dialogues de bande dessinée,” Benoît Glaude shows that by the end of the first century of comic strips, this rather new medium sets up its own norms for the representation of dialogues. Early graphic novels of the 1970s still rely on these norms inspired by various literary genres and media, particularly the novel. Glaude then studies the fictional dialogue in several comics’ novelization such as Rodolphe Topffer‘s
Voyages et aventures du docteur festus (1840), Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny’s Le petit Nicolas (1960)
and Francois Rivière’s Fabriques (1977). He concludes that contrary to what Gérard Genette (1992) found out in his study of narrativization of a dramatic text, novelization tends to amplify, thematically and stylistically the narrative of the bande dessinée, announcing the potential of bande dessinée realized in the graphic novel.
In “Encrages en jeunesse: Regards sur la novellisation pour enfants de bandes dessinées,” Laurent Bozard focuses on contemporary novelization of youth literature such as The Schtroumpf, Titeuf , Cédric, … where he shows how novelization forgets [‘oublient’] the original BD [comics] adopting only themes and characters and adapting them according to the audience and the publishers’ editorial policies (of the collection, series). He concludes that there are three types of novelization, “illustrée” [illustrated], amplificatrice
[amplifying], and “intermédiale” [transmedial/intermedial] ou “bédéisée” [“comicsified” or “graphicated”].1
Although we have only two articles about American narratives, as expected coming from one of the most influential cultures, including in the comics world, the US have produced most of these transfers from comics to novels. In “The Anti-Superhero in Literary Fiction,” Christopher Gavaler shows that if comics book authors started to ‘kill’ their superheroes very early, it is mostly during the ‘iron or bronze age’ that it became first formulaic in popular series, then almost systematic in graphic novels [Watchmen, 1985]. However, in parallel, novelists turned superheroes into icons of failure that suffer physical and metaphorical disintegration. Reversing the traditional comics formula is a way to critique the hyper-masculine violence in the service of simplified
morality that the WWII-era character type embodied and that continues to influence its 21st century incarnations.”
Also regarding the American context, in “Nostalgic Experiments: Memory in Anne Carson’s NOX and Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams’ S,” Sara Tanderup discusses a tendency towards intermediality in contemporary novels including images, drawing and photographs experimenting with the visual and material qualities of writing and the book. Although this is not new (see illuminated manuscripts and 19th century novels like I promessi
sposi2 and avant-garde work associated with ideas of progress), as Tanderup is aware, she also emphasizes the
main difference that this new trend focuses more on issues of memory and the past, especially remembering
1 The novelization is of course also very common in other languages, see for example Hellboy’s stories by Christopher Golden, or for manga, see the interview of Horibuchi Seiji [http://icv2.com/articles/comics/view/21469/horibuchi-manga]
2 See Luca Toschi’s article, “Hypertext and Authorship” on Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, in Geoffrey Nunberg, The Future of the Book, 169-94.
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the book, especially the ‘rare book’ or artists’ book while also embracing contemporary media culture as in Canadian Carson’s NOX (2009) and American Abrams/Dorst’s S (2013). Interestingly the auratic object is also a manufactured aura where avant-garde experiments turn mainstream, a ‘norm rather than an exception’.
Comics influence on text-based narratives is visible in all cultures as a transmedial and transnational phenomenon. It comes as no surprise that we find them more often in three main comics cultures: the Japanese one with Murakami using mostly American comics (DC and Marvel), the French one with Slocombe using French and also American comics, and the Latin-American one with Cortázar using Mexican reinterpretations of the French “Fantomas.” In “Transformed by Comics: The Murakamiverse, Palimpsestic Iconography, and Cumulative Meaning in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki,” Tiffany Hong shows how Murakami utilizes fan service, genre conventions/parody visual cues and manipulating of narrative temporality that has traditionally been the domain of popular culture studies and in particular, comics studies. That has more in common with the contained and idiosyncratic fictional universes of Marvel or DC than it does with the arbitrary benchmarks of a national literary tradition. She argues that Murakami consciously employs strategies prevalent in sequential art in order to metatextually question teleology and chronology, focalization in the reading experience, the hierarchy of genre, serialization as integral to the composition of the novel, and finally
the role of the visual in processing information which is particularly relevant to the Japanese language.3
In “Une approche extensive du roman graphique: Phuong-Dinh Express, Autodafé et la combustion spontanée des frontières,” Jean-Matthieu Méon shows how the frontier between roman et roman graphique was porous and used strategically by publishers and artists-novelists alike to create their artistic identity. The experimental short-lived Humanoids Associés collection called Autodafé published only five “graphic novels” (by 1. Eisner, 2. Steranko, 3. Caro et Jeunet, 4. Clerc et Bocquet et 5. Nakazawa). Its failure during the key-shifting years of 1982-83 shows how after trying to experiment with various proportions and modalities of images and texts, frontiers between both novel and graphic novel were firmly reestablished, giving birth to the graphic novel as we know today. Interestingly enough, a renewed interest in these early experimentations is now taking place in several comics culture traditions as global artefacts. While most articles on Cortázar’s Fantomas emphasizes the political aspect of the text about the human rights abuses in Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s, in “Julio Cortázar’s “Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales”: from sequential rhetoric to literary blending,” Julio Gutiérrez sheds light on its playfulness and irony. Cortázar proposes an hybridization between comics and novel by appropriating more than adapting the French-inspired Mexican comics. Through comics’ media affordances, Cortázar uses the rhetorical resources of the sequential medium in order to blend both narrative forms in order to get to new readers. Finally, experimentations had also taken place in the world of poetry, probably the furthest away from comics in many minds. In “Graphic Poetry: Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti,” Julian Peters examines how Buzzati ‘s late-career turned towards a comic-inspired idiom is linked to particular formal and thematic concerns that are characteristic of his literary and artistic production in the preceding years. As in comics, the story of Poema a fumetti is told through a sustained pairing of drawings with written passages and would become unintelligible if either element were to be removed. Then, one can say that Buzzati’s opening up of new avenues of poetic expression parallels the growing interest in the poetic possibilities of comics among avant-garde poets, underground comix authors, postmodern novelists, and graphic novelists.
3 Other popular Japanese writers like Yoshimoto Banana could certainly be included next to Murakami, although she was more influenced by Japanese manga, especially shojo.
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In conclusion, culture (in total) in the modern world has been about exchange, speed, movement and dialogue, appropriation, replication, the maximizing of the first intellectual and economic investment value. The idea that adaptation can be read only through the classic lit-film model is we think startlingly dated. Moreover, any kind of binary (a-to-b) account fails to appreciate where a meta-narrative dominates an entire cultural system; where everything is ordered to that view and where perhaps adaptation is simply a means of diffusion of deeper values, as opposed to a single site-specific exchange between mediums. Transfers from one media to another are also often about implied value judgments, maybe always so. Two general possibilities therefore emerge. On the one hand, novelists’ appropriations of comics can be taken to be about offering new recognition in, and interest for, popular culture. Following Nick Hornby’s hymn to football fandom, Fever Pitch (1992), it is legitimate for the novel to preserve itself through honoring popular culture or mass entertainment. On the other hand, contemporary fictions increased interest in rewriting or using comics tends to be about an implied improvement of a juvenile form, and hence a potentially somewhat patronizing encounter. In brief, the dominance of the literary field remains constant, and should not therefore be too quickly under-estimated. Finally, economic imperatives are equally important. Success is supposed to breed success, and publishers, media corporations, and also artists of all kinds, know that repetition is not necessarily a bad thing. Comics themselves always borrowed from the cinema (Batman’s mask being attributed often to the costume worn by ‘Zorro’) and the comic has also sourced not only film, but theatre, musicals, commercial design, children’s literature, and other genres and medias as well. Perhaps then what is really new in the material this issue is dedicated to is how the literary novel has sustained a repeated interest in graphic narrative since at least the 1970s. Moreover, precisely because mediation is complex, what is emerging is not only the story of comics turned into novels, but also the rather more exciting production of complex hybrid interventions. As several essays in the collection indicate, the resulting cultural achievements cannot really be called traditional novels, and nor are they still old fashioned graphic narrative. In France, this culture of hybridization was briefly described in the early 1980s as ‘roman graphique’ or ‘graphic novel’, in a quite different use in the USA, meaning mixed-media novels; or adult graphic narrative containing aspects of the novel, at least the experimental novel (see also Méon’s article herein). The same space is now also creating works that are not transfers or adaptations, rather there are original new forms of writing with images and texts. For example, Jean-Claude Floc’h and François Rivière’s Villa mauresque (2012) combines original writing with new images, depicting the life of the writer Somerset Maugham. It is not derived from any prior comic book source while it borrows some of the methods of comics/illustrated novels to narrate an original literary life story. Moreover, in the United States, the constraint that adult novels do not, will not, use illustration, has led to a different if equally productive track: the reflexive treatment in words of the feelings evoked by reading comics, thus the importance of several novels about nostalgia for sites of popular culture (notably in work by Rick Moody, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem; but see also Umberto Eco where
illustration does figure4). The field, and how we navigate it, is genuinely complex and multifaceted. Artists
and strip writers reinvent novels; characters from one world shift into another; stories transplant, maintaining underlying notions but changing the scenery around them; settings and protagonists move between stories and find new formats; medium transitions underline post-colonial critiques of outdated metropolitan assumptions, others recycle traditional practice in new clothes. Repetition is a part of life, but it is also a form of re-selling integral not only to individual creators and writers, but also to corporate capitalism. Finally, and of course
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we note very fully here, the very process of exploring these new kinds of writings help us question our contemporary and historical understandings of the very act of fiction itself. Would that the novel be quite as simple to understand as we have for comparative and heuristic reasons modeled it in this discussion?
Bibliography
Carrier, David. “In search of lost time: The Comics Version” in Roy Cook and Aaron Meskin, The Art of
Comics: A Philosophical Approach, 2012, 190-201.
Chabon, Michael. The Extraordinary Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. 2001.
Eco, Umberto. The Mysterious flame of the Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel. Trans. Geoffrey Brock, 2005. Floc’h, Jean-Claude, et François Rivière. Villa mauresque. 2012.
Pasamonik, Didier. “Les échos bédéphiliques d’Umberto Eco”. ActuaBD. Online. 2005.
Toschi, Luca. “Hypertext and Authorship” in Geoffrey Nunberg, The Future of the Book, 1996, 169-194. Tuten, Frederic. Tintin in the New World. 1993.
