Halloween Classics and Native American Classics

Halloween Classics, edited by Tom Pomplun. This volume was comfortably within series editor Tom Pomplun's wheelhouse, given the sort of things he's published in the past. As I've said before, there's no question that the series took a big leap forward in quality when Pomplun made the plunge into doing full-color books, because many of the illustrators and cartoonists he hires are obviously far more comfortable working this way. This volume was really as much a tribute to EC horror comics as it was to Halloween in general, with the cheesy interstitial pieces written by Mort Castle in the vein of the Crypt Keeper. I'm not sure these added much to the proceedings, because none of the jokes really landed and it felt like Castle was trying a little too hard. On the other hand, all of the actual pieces that were adapted were solid to excellent.

Ben Avery and Shepherd Hendrix's version of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was appropriately grim and cruel to its poor protagonist, the proud but flawed Ichabod Crane. At its heart a love triangle where the more noble leg of the structure is crushed, the ending has an appropriate twist given the events at the climax of the story. I always tend to picture Crane as slightly more cartoony than what see hear, but it's a decent adaptation all the same. "A Curious Dream", a Mark Twain story adapted by Antonella Caputo and artist Nick Miller, is another acidic bit of satire wherein Twain admonishes cities who let cemeteries go to seed in the form of a parade of the dead packing up their belongings and leaving. Miller's rubbery art is perfectly suited for this kind of humor.

Pomplun and Gane adapt an Arthur Conan Doyle short story called "Lot No. 249", one written during the height of the mania regarding Egypt in the late 19th century. Like many early mystery/horror stories, the revelation here is not exactly surprising to a modern viewer, which hurts its payoff section. The good news is that Doyle's craft is impeccable and his talent for creating memorable characters makes this an enjoyable read. Rod Lott and Craig Wilson's adaptation of HP Lovecraft's "Cool Air" is extremely clever and appropriately moody and atmospheric. It really gets at the creepiest aspects of Lovecraft without totally devolving into mentions of Cthulu.  The real winner in this volume is Pomplun & Matt Howarth's adaptation of the script for the film "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari", a German expressionist classic. Unlike most of the rest of this volume, which seemed pretty easy to assemble, this was a really out of the box adaptation, especially when one considers that the original was silent. It manages to be at once visceral and cartoony, creating an atmosphere of dread and absurdity befitting the source material. The ending, when madness seems to utterly warp the world of the protagonist, is cleverly pulled off by Howarth. Overall, this is a volume that doesn't stick out from many others in the series, other than my assertion that it's more confidently executed from beginning to end.

Native American Classics, edited by Tom Pomplun, Joseph Bruchac, and John E. Smelcer. On the other hand, I admire the fact that Pomplun has the guts to step away from genre fiction and take a risk, like he did with African-American Classics and the Louisa May Alcott volume. Working with Bruchac & Smelcer, both Native American poets and writers, this volume has an impressively confrontational and bold tone. There's a sense of barely contained anger and righteous bitterness that pervades the book, yet this feeling is balanced by pride and beauty. The Benjamin Truman written and Tim Truman/Jim McMunn and Mark Nelson adaptation of Zitkala-Sa's "The Soft-Hearted Sioux" sets the tone for the rest of the book, as many of the stories are about the ways in which the white man not only took their land, but tried to seduce them over to Christianity. This story shows a Sioux man's conversion as nothing less than a disaster, one that he was cursed for and eventually executed for by the very white men to whom he now owed allegiance. The multiple hands employed here made things a bit uneven, which was made unavoidable when Tim Truman fell ill and was unable to complete the story alone. A more tragic ending came to the artist Robby McMurtry, who was killed just before the book went to press. His loose, sensitive line, expressive use of color and marvelously tremulous lettering hand give the story "On Wolf Mountain" (written by Charles Alexander Eastman and adapted by Bruchac) an enormous amount of visceral power, which was crucial given this wolf vs white man fable.

Nomenclature is another important part of this book. ""The Cattle Thief" is about a native hunted by white men for his thefts, but things are turned on their head when they are reminded who stole what from whom, and when. Weshoyot Alvitre's art is dark and expressive, though the digital lettering undercuts its overall visual effect. I wish more artists used McMurtry's example as far as lettering went. For the most part, this volume is pretty sparse on stories that deal with Native American legends and mythology. "The Hunter and Medicine Legend" is an exception, as Andrea Grant & Toby Cypress adapt an Elias Johnson tale. The slightly cartoony, animation-influenced style of Cypress works well here as a group of grateful animals found a way to raise a friendly dead chief from the dead. "How The White Rage Came To America", adapted by Pomplun and Roy Boney Jr from teachings by Handsome Lake by way of Arthur C Parker, tells of how Columbus pretty literally brought the Devil to America, only even the Devil was taken aback to see how much damage he had done to the natives. It's an effective and nasty story with moments of humor and bitter truth. The Pomplun/Tara Audibert adaptation of Bertrand N.O. Walker's "A Prehistoric Race" is a very different take on the classic tortoise vs hare story with a funny twist ending.

There are lighthearted moments in the volume (like the Buffalo Wild Woman story about Coyote eating a wild potato and getting near-fatal flatulence) and some adventure stories (George Copway's "The Thunder's Nest"), but the real showstopper down the stretch is the William Jones story "Anoska Nimiwina" (adapted by Bruchac and Afua Richardson), which is more illustrated prose than a comic, but quite dynamic nonetheless. It's the epic tale of how one woman was able to bring peace between warring tribes thanks to her voice and music. The other must-read was Royal Roger Eubanks story "The Middle-Man" written by Jon Proudstar and drawn by alt-comics legend Terry Laban. It spells out in painfully exacting detail the ways in which unscrupulous businessmen used natives looking for a quick buck to provide translations services that helped the businessmen to legally take away their lucrative land during the height of the oil boom. It gets at the heart of Native oppression: lies, assurances, contracts that mean nothing and their own kind often unwittingly selling them out. Combine this with many impressive, impassioned poems in this volume and you have the sort of collection I've never seen before in comics form, one that I hope is ready by many students.

Sequart Reprints: Graphic Classics

This review was originally published in 2007 at sequart.com
**************************
Producing a viable and interesting adaptation from one form of art to another is one of the most difficult and thankless tasks for an artist. A novel is not a play is not a film is not a comic--each art form has its own unique strengths and limitations, and what gives one narrative a unique flavor in one art form can be lost in translation when it's adapted to another.

In comics, there has been a long tradition of adapting works of literature into comics. From the venerable   Classics Illustrated (soon to be resurrected) to EC printing Bible stories, the primary appeal for these adaptations was providing the general public an "easier" way of reading classic stories. The problem with such translations is that they be necessity must sacrifice the richness of the prose; the better the prose, the more the comics version can suffer. A remarkable illustration that replaces a particularly eloquent bit of prose can be a powerful experience on its own, but it's not the same experience as reading that prose. On a more practical level, there simply weren't enough pages available in a standard comic book to fit in everything from a novel, so huge chunks of story and characterization were often cut. The art in these adaptations often looked hacked out, which is not surprising considering that they were produced on a tight deadline.

The Graphics Classic line has tried to circumvent these difficulties by adapting well-known works of genre fiction that lend themselves well to a propulsive comics narrative. Series editor Tom Pomplun has also gone out of his way to use short stories rather than butcher novels. The line of comics includes HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and others--so the stories are generally plot-driven, with larger-than-life characters, and often a bit of action. Considering that many of these stories later inspired pulp novels, which in turn inspired early comics, one can see that Pomplun has made some shrewd choices in his choice of subject matter.

Given that Pomplun has carefully chosen the subject matter and has recruited a number of comics' best artistic talents to illustrate the stories, how do these volumes hold up as comics? Let's begin with the Lovecraft volume. While there are some truly excellent artists in this volume, including Matt Howarth, Richard Corben, and Rick Geary, I'd say this volume doesn't quite succeed as a comic. That has more to do with Lovecraft than it does with the artists. Lovecraft's characters tended to be ciphers whose purpose was simply to reveal a small glimpse of the horrific world that he dreamed up. That led to another problem with translating his work into comics: his stories are full of descriptions of things seen that defy description because they're too horrible to comprehend. These things are always just hinted at , just beyond our understanding. Viewing them on a page removes the mystery that gave Lovecraft's prose power and dread. In comics form, without the weight of doom that Lovecraft brings to bear, the stories are more predictable and the visual payoffs seem trite.

The other problem is that Lovecraft's stories are often short on dialogue, leading to a number of narrative-heavy captions. In the adaptation of "Herbert West: Re-Animator", the level of text used threatens to overwhelm the comics portion of the story. Indeed, it crosses the line between comic and illustrated story. The most successful story in the book as comics is probably the first, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". It works for three reasons: it's more character-oriented than the rest of the book, the slow transformation into horror is kept at an individual, human level rather than the apocalyptic levels implied in other Lovecraft stories, and the grotesque art by Simon Gane is a fitting match for this tale of a young man who slowly realizes his hideous destiny.

Much more successful in the transition from prose to comics is Adventure Classics. The sheer variety of material and artistic approaches actually improves the stories, some of which are so familiar that they cross over into cliche. For example, Mary Fleener's Cubismo technique is a nice match for the old Kipling poem "Gunga Din", and Hunt Emerson's exaggerated figures bring "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" to life. Emerson uses the verse as captions for each panel, but he packs the panels with so much detail and animation that they take on their own life. Along the same lines, Antonella Caputo & Nick Miller amusingly adapt Doyle's "The Crime of the Brigadier", which is part adventure story and part French-British humor. It's one of the few stories in the book that doesn't have a predictable ending. It's not really the fault of these stories that they're so formulaic; indeed, these authors created many of the formulae that are so familiar to the modern reader. Still, those stories that rely heavily on twist endings that most readers can see coming lose a lot of their impact.

The other standouts are Damon Runyon's "Two Men Named Collins" (adapted by Pomplun and drawn by Noel Tuazon) and Johnston McCulley's "The Stolen Story" (adapted by Pomplun and drawn by Chris Pelletiere). Both stories have a grimness to them that made them memorable and feature characters that linger in one's mind. The former is typical Runyon, about a hard-bitten soldier who lives a rough life, but winds up displaying surprising humanity. The latter (penned by the creator of Zorro), is about a man who so desperately wants to become a writer that he steals and rewrites the story of a drunken acquaintance of his. While the story is accepted and published, it unleashes a wild chain of events that result in the writer's doom. Both stories have a grittiness and ugliness to the art that perfectly matches the tone of the prose.

The third volume, Gothic Classics, has several stories that would go on to have a huge influence on the future of gothic fiction. "Carmilla", by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, would go on to inspire Dracula, though there's not much in here that's surprising for a modern audience. Lisa K Weber's cartoony grey-tones were an interesting match for this overheated bit of vampire fiction with lesbian overtones. Speaking of overheated, "The Mysteries of Udolpho" is sort of the world's first romance novel. Wildly popular at the time, its fainting heroines, mysterious castles, rugged heroes and sordid romantic details would become familiar to readers everywhere in story after story. Its adaptation here is perfunctory, getting across what a reader needs to know, but it's mostly of interest because of its historical importance and as a set-up for the best story in the book.

That would be Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey", adapted by Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons. That's a team that's worked together for quite some time, and it shows. "Northanger Abbey" is a parody of "Udolpho", and the main character actually references it in hopes that her own life would resemble that gothic tale. The delicacy of Timmons' pencils are perfect for this spoof of manners, and Robbins adeptly takes us through the story's twists and turns. It's Austen's wit that towers above all, and I was surprised at how well it translated into comics form.

The other story of note is "At The Gate" by Myra Jo Closser. It's most notable not for the very slight story about dogs waiting outside the gates of heaven, but rather for the welcome return of Shary Fleniken. I've long admired her work, and she does a nice job in making the dogs in this story expressive.
Tom Pomplun has taken on a unique project in comics, and while it's not always successful, it definitely is a worthy attempt. If nothing else, Pomplun is keeping alive stories whose influence is taken for granted today. His willingness to use a wide variety of graphic styles makes the comics worth looking at in addition to reading, though it would be nice to see ever more idiosyncratic approaches to the material. I'd be curious to read his attempts at adapting better authors, like Twain and Bierce, to see if the impact of those stories is sustained through their transformation into comics. At some point, I'd love to see him take on authors like Vonnegut, Chesterton and Asimov. While most of the stories he's adapted have been genre stories like mystery, horror, science-fiction, detective and the like, it would be interesting to see a volume built entirely around humorous short stories. That would be an excellent way of making use of another long tradition of cartooning.

Sequart Reprints:: Graphic Classics Mark Twain

This review was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
******************************

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.

Sequart Reprints: Fantasy Classics

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
****

I've reviewed a number of books in the Graphic Classics  line, and while the ambition shown in each has been impressive, adapting classic fiction hasn't always been successful. One problem has been that some of the stories that may have been innovative when published seem predictable and cliched to modern readers. Choosing the right illustrator for the right story is an endeavor in itself. Another difficulty is that not all of these stories seem like great fits to be adapted into comics form (a problem in the Lovecraft collection, for example). On the other hand, when editor and publisher Tom Pomplun finds the right formula, he really produces a winner, like in the recent reprint of the Mark Twain volume anchored by Rick Geary. The latest volume, Fantasy Classics, is perhaps the strongest volume to date that I've read from this series.

The key to its success is that its two anchor stories are classics in very different ways and both are translated quite successfully into the language of comics. The first such anchor is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story that is obviously familiar to anyone. That said, the original novel, revolutionary as it was, isn't all that widely read anymore. In the original narrative, Dr Frankenstein is frightened of the abomination that he created, but his monster is intelligent. As a result of his self-awareness, the monster is tortured by his appearance and driven to madness and murder. Confronting his creator, he demands a mate--but Dr Frankenstein reneges on his word, leading to more murder, mayhem and a showdown in the Arctic Circle. Skot Olsen was an interesting choice to illustrate this story, with his distorted and cartoony style. While he uses a washed-out approach appropriate for the gloomy nature of the story, his looser, more distorted figurework prevents the story from becoming too melodramatically oppressive in tone.

The other anchor, and one whose success lies mostly in the hands of artist Leong Wan Kok, is The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, by HP Lovecraft. This story was so successful because it didn't bother trying to set up the normal day-to-day life of protagonist Randolph Carter, then lead up to his own eventual madness/destruction (or both) like in so many Lovecraft stories. In this tale, Lovecraft (and adapter Ben Avery) gets straight to the weird and then keeps upping the ante. Carter has seen a magnificent city in his dreams called Kadath but discovers he can no longer access it--and learns that the various forces of the elder gods are trying to prevent him from finding it again. So he goes on a quest in his dreams to find the city, which finds him dealing with fierce fighting cats, ghouls, tiny creatures called Zoogs, being shanghaied to the moon by the forces of the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep, giant carnivorous worms called Dholes and a final showdown with the emissaries of the elder gods. Kok's fluid, vibrant and slightly rubbery art is a perfect match for the weirdness within this story, keeping up with Lovecraft's vivid imagination while maintaining clarity for the reader.


The other stories, "The Glass Dog" by L. Frank Baum and "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, are also quite clever. Lance Tooks handled the adaptation on the former, integrating large fields of text with his illustrations that occasionally slipped into comics form. That approach took a while to get used to, especially the overly ornate cursive script he used for dialogue. It was distracting to try and make out at times and got in the way of the story. Lettering is a tricky business, and it's one of those things that ideally should enhance what we read but never distract. Ideally, the reader should rarely consciously make note of lettering, so the way it jumped out here was a bit disconcerting. That said, once one got used to this approach, Tooks' visuals were quite beautiful and fit nicely with the story, about a scientist who raises his daughter to exude poison and the man who falls in love with her. "The Glass Dog" is a fun trifle about a wizard, a glass-blower and the awful woman the latter falls in love with. It all ends horribly, as Baum himself notes that he'd like to consult the wizard as to the moral of the story. One other note--it was nice to see Rachel Masilamani illustrate a poem here. I haven't seen much of her work since her self-published RPM COMICS. All told, I'm impressed that Pomplun is able to get such an unusual assortment of artists and writers to adapt these stories, and find ways to make them work well as comics.

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.

The Future's So Bright: Science Fiction Classics

Rob reviews the latest volume from the Graphic Classics line: SCIENCE FICTION CLASSICS (Eureka Productions).

Series editor Tom Pomplun is nothing if not ambitious, and each new volume from his GRAPHIC CLASSICS line looks a little better and reads a little better as he and others adapt works of classic and popular literature. Some are well-known stories, while others are obscure. Some of the stories are by authors not necessarily known for working in a specific genre, like E.M. Forster's science-fiction story in this edition. Some authors have proven difficult to adapt to comics form (like HP Lovecraft), while others worked surprisingly well (such as Mark Twain). Pomplun digs deep into the world of professional illustrators and alt-cartoonists to adapt the stories, and the results have sometimes been mixed. That's especially been true in stories that used a lot of deep shadings that looked a bit murky in the final product. Some artists (and stories) also cried out for color, and Pomplun finally published a volume that was full color in SCIENCE FICTION CLASSICS.

The results, pretty much across the board, were spectacular. It's a great looking volume, where every artist thought long and hard about their color choices and used them to change the way the reader thought about the art. Above all else, color was a quick way to establish mood and tone in this volume. The Rich Rainey/Micah Farritor adapation of HG Wells' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was the longest and best-known piece in the book, and Farritor in particular does a fine job of conveying the harrowing nature of the story. The use of color is muted, adding depth and atmosphere. The story is as much about the way people act and interact when society breaks down as it is about an alien invasion, and Farritor gets at the claustrophobia and sheer panic felt by those experiencing the invasion firsthand. The narrative moves the story along at a nearly frenetic clip and never bogs down while still conveying the protagonist's sheer, human panic.

Pomplun was devoted to providing a wide arrange of visual approaches in this volume. From Farritor's moody naturalism we veer off into the crudely humorous art of humorist Johnny Ryan adapting a Jules Verne short story. It's an interesting choice and a clever one, given that this is a story predicting things about the far future (a thousand years) that came true fewer than 200 years later. The bright, simple colors add to the tongue-in-cheek presentation of this adaptation. On the other hand, "A Martian Odyssey" is straight-up pulp, and the ultra-slick art of George Sellas, while off-putting at first, did wind up to be a great match. The story itself is nothing special, but Sellas keeps things moving and the red tint to the story really drew the eye in. This story would have been a disaster in black & white. Antonella Caputo & Brad Teare's "The Bureau D'Echange du Maux", an adaptation of a Lord Dunsany story, gave the book a dirtier art style that was appropriate given the more supernatural nature of this entry. The story's idea was clever: a shop where one could exchange one evil for another (the men who traded wisdom for folly was especially clever).

The two standout pieces in the book were "The Disintegration Machine" (originally by Arthur Conan Doyle) and "The Machine Stops" (by Forster). While they were the best-written pieces in the book, they were also superbly illustrated. Choosing the great Roger Langridge to humorously illustrate the Doyle piece was an inspired choice, and writer Rod Lott left Langridge plenty of space to do what he does best: cleanly and smoothly tell a story with charm, humor and a touch of anarchy. Langridge's clear-line works quite well with color, making this story a pleasure to look at and read. Langridge in particular excels at selling the humor of a story through character facial expressions alone.


Ellen Lindner, one of my favorite young artists, teamed with Pomplun to adapt the Forster story. It's interesting that for a distopian story, Lindner chose to go with a lot of soft, bright colors. It gave the underground world run entirely by an all-powerful machine a cheerful but queasy feeling. Linder focuses on facial expressions above all else in her work, and her slightly thick and exaggerated line was an especially nice fit for this story of a mother detached from her son--and reality. Forster seems to be making a none-too-veiled attack on modernity and technocracy with this story, exaggerating its influence on the societyof his time for effect. Of course, the kind of social isolation suggested as a side-effect of the machine's influence is quite relevant in today's world. It's a clever character piece with an intriguing concept, and Lindner's stylish art feels well-matched with the more restrained style of Forster. Overall, this is the most successful of the GRAPHIC CLASSICS books. Color was absolutely necessary to pull this book off, and Pomplun made sure that the stories chosen would really pop out at the reader. That made every story flow organically as something to read and look at simultaneously. This is something that should happen naturally on the comics page but is often an issue when adapting a story to comics.

Only My Genius: Graphics Classics/Oscar Wilde

Rob reviews the sixteenth volume from the Graphic Classics series edited by Tom Pomplun, featuring adaptations of short stories by Oscar Wilde (Eureka Productions).


Tom Pomplun's task of adapting classic and/or pulp literature into comics form has had its share of successes and misfires throughout the course of his publishing GRAPHIC CLASSICS. Most of the volumes have skewed toward classic genre stories, be it horror, adventure or science-fiction. The atmospheric or kinetic nature of those stories naturally lend themselves to a visual adaptation, even if the stories themselves are more than a little uneven. A number of the stories he edits are densely wordy, making the issue of adapting them a difficult endeavor. Some authors, like HP Lovecraft, are almost impossible to translate into comics form because the sheer denseness of Lovecraft's atmospheric horror writing is pretty much the entire appeal of the work. Something gets lost in the translation when it was brought into comics form.

On the other hand, the Mark Twain volume worked precisely because the economy of Twain's writing and his wit lent themselves to a crackling visual presentation. This was even more true of the latest volume, featuring adaptations of Oscar Wilde's short stories. This was by far the most successful of Pomplun's volumes for any number of reasons. First, this volume only had four stories, and each was allowed to be fully fleshed out and breathe. Second, the match between artist and subject matter of each story was ideal. Third, Wilde's work has a modern sensibility to it and a lightness to its prose style. Wilde keeps things moving, and while he can turn a phrase, he's not so in love with the sound of his own "voice" that his stories bog down. The way he paced and created transitions from scene to scene made it ideal for translating it into comics form. Lastly, his satiric voice is devastating even today. There's a viciousness to his satire that's hilarious and even unnerving at times, and the way he combines his skewering of social mores with legitimately exciting plot twists makes this comic satisfying on every level.


Lisa K. Weber illustrated and Alex Burrows adapted "The Picture of Dorian Gray", a story whose basic twist (a painting growing older while its subject stayed eternally young) is known to most. What's interesting about reading the actual story is that it's a vicious satire of upperclass life and the narcissism it engenders. Its subject, given the opportunity to lead the most dissipated of lifestyles with no ill effects to himself, becomes vain and self-centered to the point of solipsism. That detachment from human relationships, that total loss of empathy, made it easy for him to become a murderer, because other people had no more importance than objects. The famous quote "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?" is the lynchpin of this story, leading Gray to reconnect with his conscience, a little too late.



"The Canterville Ghost" is both a parody of overstuffed Gothic horror stories and a scathing parody of the foibles of nouveau riche Americans and stuff British nobility. The concept of an ancient ghost not only being unable to scare the Americans who had bought a castle, but of being frightened of them was a hilarious one. The story then takes a slightly more serious and even sentimental turn toward the end, with tongue still firmly in cheek all the while. The team of Antonello Caputo and Nick Miller gave the story a light touch. Miller's line is a thin one, bolstered by characters with their eyes bugging out, exaggerated expressions and manic action. About my only complaint is that this story wasn't hand-lettered; the computer font was a bit distracting and took one's eye out of the panel at times.



"Lord Arthur Saville's Crime" is another story ragging on the aristocracy, this time in the form of free will vs fate. Saville learns from a palm reader that he's supposed to kill someone. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he might become a murderer at any time and sets out to kill someone as innocuously as possible so as to avoid a nastier murder later. Of course, those murders go comically wrong and Saville is first forced to think of another solution--and then that solution is thwarted at the very end. Stan Shaw's art is rougher and blockier than the other artists, giving the whole story a raw quality that works to its advantage.



The best story and adaptation was "Salome", adapted by Pomplun and drawn by erotic comics artist Molly Kiely. Kiely's mastery of body language and depiction of seduction made her an inspired choice for this retelling of the wicked Salome desiring the head of a prophet she lusted after on a plate. It's an interesting companion piece to "Dorian Gray" in the way it examines lust, narcissism and obsessiveness and the way each grows out of control when presented with no constraints. Like "Dorian Gray", Wilde delves into some dark areas here, with the implied necrophilia at the end a signal that Salome had gone too far. Both stories also have a strongly implied homoerotic element that shocked readers at that time. In this book, that simply serves to flesh out the characters a bit more and offer an alternative to the narcissism of the leads. In "Salome", the love that one guard has for another plays out first as jealousy but then as real concern for his friend becoming obsessed with as wicked a character as Salome. And that concern came with good reason, as his friend wound up killing himself when it was clear that Salome had no interest in him and couldn't care less when he died.

If Wilde was writing today, I'm convinced that comics may very well have wound up being his medium of choice. The crispness and wit of his stories, combined with a certain visual flair and clever plotting, would have served him perfectly in working with any number of cartoonists. He was truly a man ahead of his time.