Sequart Reprints:: Graphic Classics Mark Twain

This review was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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In my review of several entries from the Graphic Classics line of adaptations, I noted that some of the stories chosen seemed ill-suited for comics, and wondered what the Mark Twain collection might look like. Series editor Tom Pomplun was kind enough to send over a galley of their upcoming revised edition of Twain, and the results were impressive.

The reason why I think it worked so well was Twain's economy of style in his prose, the liveliness of the scenarios he concocted translated nicely to the language of comics, and the artists selected were astutely matched with the particular stories. Many of the stories contain some of Twain's most cynical, acidic works of satire. Even the adaptation of the little-read "Tom Sawyer Abroad", written from Huck Finn's simple-but-secretly-sophisticated point of view, contains a number of digs at religion, science, and imperialism. George Sellas' cartoony style is a nice match for what is also a rip-roaring adventure story, where Tom, Huck and Jim wind up on a mechanized hot-air balloon that sails over the Atlantic and winds up in Africa. Like any good comics story depicting action, there's a propulsive quality in both prose and art that leaves the reader breathless as they flip from page to page. The way that no-nonsense Huck acts as the foil for the slightly pompous Tom is what informs Twain's commentary and makes it crackle. The manner in which Twain is able to use Huck to get his points across while leaving him as one of the most vivid characters of all time speaks to his skill as a writer.

Twain certainly wasn't afraid to go over the top in scoring satiric points. "The Facts Concerning The Recent Carnival Of Crime In Connecticut", adapted by Antonella Caputo & Nicholas Miller, features an exaggerated rubbery art style to match the ridiculousness of the scenario. It's about a man who happens to encounter his own conscience, in the form of a dwarf. His conscience literally tortures him, until he understands that the less he allows his conscience to affect his actions and feelings, the weaker it gets. He then throttles his conscience to death--and sets about committing crime after crime! This story humorously gets across the notion of what conscience is, why we act the way we do, and is more than a little ambiguous on which side Twain falls.

By far the darkest and best story in the collection is "The Mysterious Stranger", which is one of the nastiest, most cynical stories I've ever read. It's a story of a medieval village, and a stranger who appears to three boys. His name is Satan--an angel who is the nephew of Hell's Satan. An angel does not possess "the moral sense", that which enables us to tell good from evil. As the angel proceeds to demonstrate time after time throughout the story, "good" and "evil" often depends on who's judging it, who's meting out punishment for committing evil acts and one's own attempts at justifying one's comfort. In particular, Twain has sharp words for those who declare morality to be what separates us from the animals, since men commit acts of cruelty that animals never would.

The boys ask Satan to improve people's lives, but that often winds up as him killing them so as to avoid more years of suffering on earth. Toward the end, Twain attacks the twin notions of Christianity and civilization as unequivocally good things: "We saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through the ages, leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake...Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs who despise you--but whom you continue to fight and die for." Toward the end of the story, the boys asked Satan to make a friend of theirs, accused of thievery, happy. He responds by driving him insane. When confronted, Satan replies, "It was the truth. I said he would be happy, and he is now the one utterly happy person in this empire. No sane man can be happy. It seems to me that you are too hard to please." Twain then really unloads on religion at the very end, rejecting "a god who mouths mercy and invented hell", reducing the story and its surroundings to a dream.

Twain manages to do this while crafting an entertaining story full of twists and turns, made wickedly delightful thanks to the hand of Rick Geary, an artist who specializes in this sort of period piece. The light line and exaggerated character design are exactly what this darkly humorous story required. Even Twain's lighter-hearted stories contained a darker, cynical undercurrent as he took on hypocrisy and self-delusion. It only makes sense that a graphic adaptation of his work should also have a comic face that masks a darker heart. Every American satirist owes a debt to Twain, in terms of his boldness, clarity, wit, storytelling ability and the manner in which he managed to encapsulate both folk and sophisticated elements in his writing. Pomplun does a fine job here of finding ways to best fit his work into comics language. Given comics' long history of presenting illustrated satire, the fit only seems natural, but Pomplun clearly took pains in searching for the right artist to go with the right story. A volume solely devoted to great works of satire would probably be an enormous success in this series; I'd love to see an artist tackle Swift's "A Modest Proposal", Voltaire's Candide, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, various works by Aristophanes along with more modern satirists.

NBM Spotlight: Yslaire/Carriere, Nix, De Crecy, Geary

Let's run through a number of recent releases from NBM.

The Sky Over The Louvre, by Bernar Yslaire & Jean-Claude Carriere. This is the latest volume of NBM's series done in conjunction with the Louvre and French publisher Futuropolis. It's also the biggest and flashiest, with the script written by legendary French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere and art by hugely popular Belgian cartoonist Bernar Yslaire. Carrier wrote most of the scripts for surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel as well as scripts for Milos Forman and Louis Malle, among others. This was his first comic, and what was surprising was how relatively spare the text was. That was partly illusory, as there are several text sections, but the creators found a way to emphasize image above all else. Yslaire is a scratchy and scribbly penciler whose line reminds
me of MAD's Mort Drucker, believe it or not. His characters have long, narrow faces, prominent and pointy noses, puckered-up lips and retain a lively naturalism even when their actions are cartoony. He wisely uses a highly muted palette so as to make the actual paintings depicted in this book really pop off the page.


That's a fitting treatment, considering that the book is about the earliest days of the Louvre right before Robespierre's Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Its main protagonists are the famous painter David (founder of the Louvre) and Robespierre himself. As a narrative, The Sky Over The Louvre is simple, as it follows the two friends as their relationship fractures in light of The Terror and Robespierre's obsession with David depicting the Supreme Being in a painting. The through-line of the narrative focuses on a mysterious young boy named Jules Stern, whose presence becomes the catalyst for the conflict between the book's protagonists.


Thematically, this book is complex. The precise relationship between Jules and David is unclear, though the homoeroticism surrounding the aesthetics of the Revolution is quite evident. The intersection between art and politics is another major theme, as David is happy to act as official portrait propagandist for the Revolution (painting portraits of martyrs and training
future generations of artists). Robespierre is portrayed as a somewhat sympathetic figure despite the paranoia of the Terror; he's an idealist given absolute power. Still, David is willing to along with this until Robespierre becomes obsessed with depicting the new Supreme Being, reintroducing the specter of religion back into the culture. Once the guillotine caught up with
Robespierre, it didn't take long for David to glom on to his true model for Supreme Being: the "handsome like antiquity" likeness of Napoleon.


The book is filled with people facing a vacuum of morality, as the Committee For Public safety's reliance on "reason" becomes just as capricious and merciless for the people of France as the old monarchy. As a result, it's easy for Committee members to attempt to justify their actions in the interest of rooting out traitors and protecting the Republic, a story that doesn't have to be presented as a history lesson for it to become instantly familiar to a modern reader. At the same time, David's willingness to sell out the revolution and Robespierre's absolute devotion to his principles (no matter how insane) muddies the waters as for whom the reader should feel sympathy. At just 66 pages, The Sky Over The Louvre moves along at an economical clip, quickly & efficiently setting up its protagonists and their conflicts. That efficiency allows for long looks at historical paintings, while the oversized album size provides a proper format for appreciating the sumptuous art.


Salvatore Volume I, by Nicolas De Crecy. This compendium of the first two translated volumes from De Crecy is slyly charming both in terms of its narrative and its aesthetic appeal. The story follows a dog mechanic named Salvatore who surreptitiously steals parts from his customers in order to build a strange vehicle to take him to his true love, half a world away. De Crecy uses an anthropomorphic style that's both cute and slightly disturbing. The character design is disturbing because De Crecy clearly finds it funnier to draw his characters closer to animal than human, and as a result his choices of pig, bull and cow lead to hilariously grotesque and bloated figures. The narrator of the story is frequently harshly judgmental, so much so that even the characters comment on the narrator from time to time when it explores and sometimes condemns their questionable moral decisions.


What I like best about this comic is the way De Crecy slips between whimsical flights of fancy and harsh naturalism. One of the main characters in the book is a myopic pig named Amondine. Her husband worked at a slaughterhouse until he was downsized--and the form that this downsizing took was his being turned into meat! It's one of many quietly grim gags in this book, like a piglet of Amondine's being captured and strapped to a cross by a group of goths before he's rescued by a teenage anthropomorphic cat. While there's a definite narrative to follow in this book, what makes it delightful is De Crecy's willingness to follow a tangent for a long time. There's an extended sequence where the half-blind Amondine drives her car off a cliff but doesn't realize she's in great peril as the car bounces on an airplane, soars off a ski lift, and crashes on a roof. This is one of many such sequences in the book, and that incidental character material winds up being the true meat of the book. The rich colors by Ruby & Walter mesh perfectly with De Crecy's scribbly line, complementing the relaxed energy of the pencils without overwhelming them.

The Lives of Sacco and Venzetti, by Rick Geary. This is the latest in Geary's "Treasury of XXth Century Murder" series, and each volume tends to have a different theme depending on the historical event he chooses to cover. Famous Players was about the ways in which the magic of Hollywood was truly founded on lies and illusions that in many ways poison the art that proceeds out of it. The Terrible Axe-Man Of New Orleans was about the ways in which fear can spin out of control, take on a life of its own, and wound the psyche of a city. Sacco & Vanzetti is the rare Geary book that's more about the trial than it is about the crime (though there's certainly a great deal of detail about that as well). As always, Geary editorializes as little as possible, but this case was considered worldwide to be a matter of red-scare blaming and a railroading of two innocent men.


Geary does acknowledge that there's at least the possibility that the gun that killed one of the victims of the crime could have belonged to Sacco (thanks to advanced ballistics techniques), but the fact that the judge was quoted as delighting in punishing the two Italian anarchists and the legal system made it impossible for any appeal to have a chance of success certainly demonstrates that the prosecution lacked anything near the sort of proof necessary to earn a conviction. The case was a simple matter of xenophobia and a fear of the anarchist movement driving the legal system and derailing justice, and there is an obvious resonance between this story and the current xenophobia in the US. As always, Geary's pencils are incredibly tight, as he's the master of hatching. The detail on suits alone makes this book a visual feast, but it's the way he brings people alive that's truly impressive. The facial expressions and body language of the men and women in court is what secretly tells the story; a sneer from the judge, a raised eyebrow from a lawyer tell much more than their actual words. I'm eager to see what he intends to tackle next.


Kinky & Cosy, by Nix. This translated collection of gags about marauding teenage sisters is billed as "shocking! disgusting!" as well as "darkly subversive". It's certainly mild in comparison to actual shock humor, and the gags themselves are more hit than miss. That said, there's a certain self-possessed weirdness about the whole enterprise. The hardback cover has cut-outs for the googly-eyes that pop out from underneath it. There are bizarre, entirely self-indulgent fumetti segments in the book featuring various men dressing up as Kinky, Cosy or their parents. There's an entire section devoted to "Brain Teasers": mazes, matching images, and assorted counting games featuring the strip's cast. Of course, they do things like throw anvils at the teacher, so it's not quite a typical activity page.

Nix's work reminds me a little of Joe Daly, only without the existential ruminations and level of detail in his art. The best way to read it is not to expect shock or killer gags, but instead to settle in and enjoy the strange rhythms of this book. As silly and absurd as this world is, it's clear that Nix has a great deal of genuine affection and enthusiasm for it. He seems to enjoy dropping in on these characters to see what odd thing they're up to with little concern as to either traditional comedic set-ups or lock-solid punchlines. Instead, we get strips about the mother's various forms of vibrator (including buying one from a roaming vibrator truck and finding a miniature alien space probe) as well as her falling in love with a recycling bin. Kinky & Cosy is a singularly odd entry in an increasingly crowded market of edgy humor books, one that's gentler in nature than one might think at first but is not distinctive for its actual jokes.

Graphic Classics: Poe and Christmas

Let's take a look at some recent volumes from the Graphic Classics line.


Edgar Allan Poe is the fourth, expanded edition of the very first volume from Graphic Classics. The results are a mixed bag, due in part to the difficulty in translating the atmosphere of dread and madness essential to Poe's work into comics form. One example is Rick Geary's adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart", one of Poe's most intense, gripping stories. While Geary's rendering is spot-on and suitably creepy, the short adaptation lacks the same impact of the short story, in part because this abbreviated version doesn't have the same tense, crazy momentum of the short story. The story puts the reader in the grip of the narrator's madness, whereas the reader is merely an observer in the comic. On the other hand, the straightforward rendering by David Hontiveros & Carlo Vergara of "The Pit and the Pendulum" makes the story clearer, in part because it's less about the mental status of its protagonist than it is about a particular environment. There story fairly cries out for a visual component.

Art by Matt Howarth

The other problem with this volume is that a number of Poe's stories have a certain sameness to them, differentiated only by length and tone. A number of his characters wind up in the grip of madness, frequently precipitated by bouts of alcoholism ("William Wilson", "The Black Cat"). Two stories feature people being bricked behind a wall, be it alive or dead ("The Black Cat", "A Cask of Amontillado"). "The Tell-Tale Heart" famously features the titular body part driving the narrator mad after he commits murder. Two stories concern premature burial, with "The Fall of the House of Usher" the more elaborate of the two. That story was adapted by Matt Howarth (of Those Annoying Post Bros fame) and he brought his trademark manic energy to it, with lots of hatching and cross-hatching in play to emphasize the dread the title house invokes. The other such story, "The Premature Burial", had pleasingly neurotic-looking art by Joe Ollmann, best known now for his Drawn & Quarterly work. Milton Knight's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" was actually one of the more successful adaptations in the book, partly because it didn't try to match Poe's tone of dread and instead went to a more broadly humorous interpretation of a boastful bet gone horribly wrong.


If the book of Poe adaptations was uneven, the Christmas Classics book was remarkable in its consistency. What's impressive is that this volume provided a wider range of tones and storytelling styles than the Poe book did, even if the subject would seem to be far more restrictive. Pomplun was aided by once again publishing a full-color volume, which has helped the most recent volumes in the Graphic Classics series really pop. He also did a nice job cherry-picking a couple of traditional Christmas pieces (like A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and A Visit From St. Nicholas by Clement Moore) with more obscure pieces by famous authors like Willa Cather, O. Henry, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He also gave the artists some room to let their stories breathe, with page counts ranging from 8 to 46.

The Dickens adaptation, by Alex Burrows and Micah Farritor, was a fairly straightforward,
painted version of the familiar story. The story retained more of the flavor of the original Dickens story than most adaptations tend to. The Rich Rainey/Hunt Emerson adaptation of Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle" was an absolute delight, thanks to the great Emerson's cartoony, angular features. Sherlock Holmes stories do quite well as comics, thanks to their emphasis on plot and action, but Emerson added a level of visual wit that made this especially memorable. The O.Henry story's eventual plot twist was more restrained than usual for his stories, and Cynthia Martin's naturalistic style was well-suited for it. Willa Cather's crazy story about the White Bear who protects Santa's reindeer and the vicious Werewolf Dog who menaced them was heightened by the occasionally lurid colors of Evert Geradts, striking an interesting balance between comics and storybook graphics.

Art by Cynthia Martin

Fitzgerald's "A Luckless Santa Claus" was written when he was just sixteen years old and displays a wit and sophistication that was far beyond his years. Simon Gane was up to the task of drawing a snowy New York City near the turn of the 20th century, and the result is a treat for fans of Fitzgerald who may not be familiar with this story. Finally, Pomplun unearthed a fascinating story by an obscure 19th century author named Fitz-James O'Brien that was a sort of proto-fantasy/conspiracy story about a group of villains plotting to kill all the Christian children in a city with toys animated by evil spirits. O'Brien lacked the sophistication and subtlety of great authors like Cather or Fitzgerald, but his pulp storytelling instincts were quite sharp and added a wicked edge to a collection of stories about Christmas. Pomplun is really on a roll with his most recent volumes and is getting the most out of adapting these stories as true comics, rather than just illustrated text.

Two Takes On Murder & Suffering: Famous Players & Arlene's Heart

Rob takes a look at two very different looks at murder and violence: FAMOUS PLAYERS, by Rick Geary; and ARLENE'S HEART, by Victoria Frances. Both books are from NBM.


Rick Geary has long been comics' go-to man for grisly historical events, with his series of books on famous and mysterious deaths from NBM. After many books on 19th century deaths, he's only recently started to dip into the 20th century, and FAMOUS PLAYERS doesn't really solve a mystery as it does tear away a facade. It's about the death of Hollywood film director William Desmond Taylor and the hysteria that resulted after his murder was discovered. In a very matter-of-fact manner, Geary first lays out a brief history of Los Angeles, how the film industry came to dominate it (much to the consternation of the locals) in the 1920s, and how Taylor figured into it. Our tabloid and gossip obsessed culture certainly didn't arise out of a vacuum, and Geary draws a pretty straight line between the murder of Taylor (along with the trial of comedian Fatty Arbuckle) as the events that gave rise to the overwhelming popularity of scandal sheets as well as a repressive film code that stunted film for nearly fifty years.


Geary's storytelling is both methodical and leisurely. He wants to make the reader understand the era, one that he clearly has some affection for. It's obvious that he spent a lot of time with photo reference of the era, given the loving reproductions of not only the principals of the event, but chapter-leading illustrations of other famous stars of the era. Of course, scratch the surface, as this murder did, and one can find all sorts of hypocrisy. This wound up being an unsolved murder, but Geary carefully takes us through all of the known (and substantiated) evidence in a methodical manner. He first recreates the discovery of Taylor's body by his cook/valet (and his subsequent hysterical reaction), the arrival of the police, a weird pronouncement by a "doctor" who subsequently vanished, and curious onlookers & neighbors who disturbed the forensic evidence. Throughout the book, Geary uses intense hatching to add texture and weight to his otherwise thin line. It also gives a certain power to his caricatures, bringing his comics a certain nervous energy that brings his characters to life. Lastly, it draws the reader's eye around the page, given his spare use of spotting blacks.


After stepping the reader through the craziness of the body's discovery, Geary then takes a step back and tries to recreate the night of the murder, based on witness testimony. Geary scrupulously tries to stick the facts as they were known and debunks gossip and outright scandal sheet fabrication that tried to fan the flames of sensationalism. Of course, there was no need for sensationalism, given that truth was far stranger than fiction. Details of Taylor's life eventually emerged, creating a portrait of a man who changed his name and left his old life behind (one hat included a wife and daughter) after he came to terms with the true nature of his sexuality. This would be a trend in Hollywood that continues to this day: the unfortunate closeting of sexuality to deflect press scrutiny and preserve public image.

That digging revealed a long list of potential suspects with all sorts of motives: jilted starlets, drug-dependent actresses, psychotic mothers, studio heads, past and current servants, former soldiers under his command and a host of others. Geary patiently noted how each of them were debunked or dismissed as potential suspects, given alibis and shaky motives. The fact that the case was unsolved, combined with the multiple trials for Arbuckle, drew a lot of national vitriol from various public morality groups for Hollywood. This led to the shackling Hays code, which restricted film content for decades. As an aside, it was an interesting coincidence that comic books rose to become such a cultural force within a decade of the code's enforcement, especially since they were rife with precisely the sort of images the code banned. This book doesn't really have an ending per se; instead, it posits the murder of Taylor as the first chapter of a bizarre series of tragedies and scandals--some coincidential, others self-inflicted--that the land of make-believe and fantasy continues to generate. It's telling that in the book's final image, Geary reveals that Taylor is interred in the Hollywood Forever cemetary under his real name--the illusion stripped away in the face of mortality.

If Geary's book plumbs the source of mystery and misery, Spanish painter Victoria Frances seeks to wallow in the pain of human misery so as to give it a name and exorcise it. In ARLENE'S HEART, Frances touches on nearly every kind of pain experienced by the downtrodden of the world as a sort of dark fantasy world that is experienced as a cleansing gauntlet by her doll heroine. Painting in the Japanese "dollfie" style, we are introduced to Arlene, a homeless girl who makes dolls and whose fondest wish is to become a doll herself. After she dies of cancer (which included a scarring mastectomy), she gets her wish and becomes a doll who starts travelling unseen through a world that has some magical qualities (like a woman reborn as a butterfly) but is mostly horrific. We are introduced to oppressed gay and transgendered people, abused women, women oppressed by religion, children with cancer, abused animals, junkies, homeless old women (who doubled as witches), people suffering the effects of war and landmines, and children suffering from poisoned environments. The doll empathizes with each of them as she searches for her heart, and she finally finds it in the city, a discovery that gave comfort to all.

This book (and it's illustrated prose, not a comic in any sense) is enormously heart-felt, earnest and well-meaning. Frances has great skill as a fantasy/gothic painter. Unfortunately, the book is as subtle as a sledgehammer, with Frances feeling that she needed to spell out her fairy-tale symbols that fairly screamed out their meaning on the page. It didn't help that she also tacked on an epilogue that further explicated the meanings behind her images. The other problem with the book is that her airbrushed and photorealist style has a cold, distancing feel. As a reader, I felt no empathy with the parade of woe that Frances relentlessly described on page after page. The book's climax, where Arlene befriended a seal only to see it clubbed to death by hunters, felt more like a Johnny Ryan joke than a definitive condemnation of cruelty visited upon the innocent. Frances was ambitious in trying to create a personal work that dealt with political issues, but she overreached from the book's start and wound up with a pretty-looking mess that bordered on kitsch.