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Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, and
Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot (Eds.), Comics and
Adaptation,
trans. Aarnoud Rommens and
David Roche
Charlotte Pylyser
Comics and Adaptation (2018, University Press of Mississippi) is translated by Aarnoud Rommens and
David Roche from Bande dessinée et adaptation, an edited volume by Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot published in 2015 by the Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. The book treats the question of comics and adaptation - with comics or graphic novels as both source texts and adaptations - at length and in depth for the first time in English, focussing more specifically on comics adaptations of literature (in part 1) and film adaptations of comics (in part 2). The edited volume considerably furthers research on this topic through its able blending of theoretical meditations, analyses and case studies (which notably also help develop a group of classics in terms of comics and adaptation: “There Will Come Soft Rains”, 120, rue de la
Gare, Sin City, The Adventures of Tintin, Watchmen, 300…), but not every article sufficiently contributes to
the demystification of the topic. The book starts with an introduction that situates adaptation studies in relation to comics and comics studies, and familiarizes readers with a number of classics in both fields of which Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) is doubtless the most high-profile one. The introduction also presents some themes and topics - fidelity, media specificity (mediagenius), intertextuality, parody, convergence culture, logophilia/iconophobia - which overwhelmingly European researchers subsequently study in the book as part of investigating the “missing adaptation link in the comics genome” (8). In this act of study, the book’s interest in general and theoretical questions certainly sets it apart from the little research that exists on comics and adaptation and that is characterized by a (film) case study approach. The introduction already provides a substantial Works Cited list for those interested in the topic. Jan Baetens further contributes considerably to the investigation on a theoretical level with his opening chapter, which recalls, from the perspective of music studies, “that the enunciation of any work is always multiple”, that “today […] the works […] can only survive if they constantly migrate from one medium to another” and that self-adaptation has
Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot (Eds.), Comics and
Adaptationt
Translated by Aarnoud Rommens and David Roche Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2018 238 pages, 36 b&w illustrations, introduction, index ISBN 9781496803375 (hardback)
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become crucial to the media landscape (20, 31, 34). Adaptation explores new relationships between all aspects of the literary and artistic institution, so Baetens rightfully explains, and he casts the process as a resolutely historical one which facilitates the access to a “better understanding of the literary values of a given moment” in addition to, more traditionally, as a relationship between two semiotic objects (43). The Belgian prof. and poet also underlines the role of the reader in adaptations which he analyses in different forms: Tardi (Leo Malet), Olivier Deprez (Kafka), Martin Vaughn-James (self-, nouveau roman), Yves Chaland (clear line), Matt Madden (Queneau), Simon Grennan (adaptation as dialogism and collective creation), all are (expertly) used as examples. Nicolas Labarre’s analysis of “There Will Come Soft Rains” adapted from a story by Ray Bradbury by Al Feldstein and Wallace Wood and colored by Marie Severin is further interesting from a culture historical point of view, which is also the case for Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s “Fritz the Cat (1972)”, a convincing culture historical representation of the post-utopian 1970s adapted from R.Crumb, while Labarre’s analysis helps us imagine the Russian - American rivalry and the technological race and binaries that accompanied it. Both texts also successfully investigate the adaptive questions of fidelity and indigenization. At the outset of the second part, Alain Boillat’s investigation of the transposition of original comics to films beautifully demonstrates the complexity of film adaptations of comics and offers pride of place to a so-called intermedial “comics effect” with the film often reflexively “incorporating elements commonly associated with comics, including the sequencing of still images, the inclusion of word balloons, changes in format, captions, and so on” (136), especially in the credits. Throughout, the book also reconstructs the history of (especially French and Francophone) comics adaptation (although Labarre and Gabilliet evidently contribute to American adaptive comics historiography), as in Philippe Bourdier’s text about Corto Maltese: La cour secrète des Arcanes, which provides readers with precious insight in the various aspects (visual, verbal, narrative) and sometimes arbitrariness of the adaptation process and it frequently deploys a rather more European semiotic approach to the research question. Comics theoreticians mentioned as part of this approach are of course often French-speaking with Baetens, Gaudreault, Groensteen, Marion and Peeters mentioned particularly frequently, also by those researchers not discussed separately in the present text: Christophe Gelly on 120, rue de la Gare, Laura Cecilia Caraballo on Doctor Jekyll & Mister Hyde, Dick Tomasovic on Marvel adaptations and Pierre Floquet on Sin City. Unfortunately not all articles in the book stay in memory. “From Screen to Page?”, the article about ABC’s TV show Castle which describes how a real graphic novel exists that adapts the imaginary work of the fictional author in the series does not advance investigatively enough into the case for the presence of the essay in the volume not to be questionable and the article about the Cid seems to lack a genuinely convincing argument although the author’s final note that “the persistence of the first text in any adaptation would therefore support the theory that the myth […] does derive its force not so much from its hero but from its successive rewritings and representations” (63) is certainly inspirational. The translation is of good quality overall and the book comes with an index as well as with contributor bios; the texts also provide an extensive notes apparatus and bibliography so the book can be used as a stepping stone for further research on the topic of comics and adaptation. The volume certainly succeeds in encouraging research on the topic (and perhaps even in the existence of adaptation) through the way in which it convinces readers to approach adaptation and specifically comics and adaptation with an open mind, to see the creative opportunities. Within that frame it might have been interesting to more extensively and explicitly contextualize the thoughts on comics and adaptation within the changing role of adaptation in contemporary media culture, but this first book on the topic is of course inclined to a more exclusive focus on comics. Adaptation does not always carry a productive
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name, as is also discussed in the introduction of the book, and too many articles tending towards “From Screen to Page?” and the investigation of the Cid (and thus away from productivity) can be found in Comics and
Adaptation for it to fully escape the descriptor “unremarkable”. The book nonetheless certainly adds to the
scholarly dialogue on both comics and adaptation, which it traces historically and medially-narratologically, and adaptation, whose conception it works on in an inspirational fashion, for example by pointing out the importance of desire as the adaptive raison d’être, but also by paying attention to the therapeutic reasons that can exist for adaptation as in Cava’s El hombre descuadernado treated by Benoît Mitaine.
Charlotte Pylyser is a post-doc at KU Leuven.
