Comics and Adaptation

Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, Aarnoud Rommens, Benoit Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496815323
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Jan Baetens, Alain Boillat, Philippe Bourdier, Laura Cecilia Caraballo, Thomas Faye, Pierre Floquet, Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Christophe Gelly, Nicolas Labarre, Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, Dick Tomasovic, and Shannon Wells-LassagneBoth comics studies and adaptation studies have grown separately over the past twenty years. Yet there are few in-depth studies of comic books and adaptations together. Available for the first time in English, this collection pores over the phenomenon of comic books and adaptation, sifting through comics as both sources and results of adaptation. Essays shed light on the many ways adaptation studies inform research on comic books and content adapted from them. Contributors concentrate on fidelity to the source materials, comparative analysis, forms of media, adaptation and myth, adaptation and intertextuality, as well as adaptation and ideology.After an introduction that assesses adaptation studies as a framework, the book examines comics adaptations of literary texts as more than just illustrations of their sources. Essayists then focus on adaptations of comics, often from a transmedia perspective. Case studies analyze both famous and lesser-known American, Belgian, French, Italian, and Spanish comics.Essays investigate specific works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Castilian epic poem Poema de Mio Cid, Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, French comics artist Jacques Tardi's adaptation 120, rue de la Gare, and Frank Miller's Sin City. In addition to Marvel Comics' blockbusters, topics include various uses of adaptation, comic book adaptations of literary texts, narrative deconstruction of performance and comic book art, and many more.

PART I

From Page to Panel

Adaptation: A Writerly Strategy?

JAN BAETENS

We are all well aware of the great pitfall of classic studies on adaptation. It is not so much their attachment to the principle of fidelity that several recent studies have foregrounded,¹ but rather their inability to break free from a certain binary approach. Adaptation implies a here and an elsewhere, as well as a before and an after, and the insistence on maintaining a similar gap between adapted and adapting remains one of the main elements hampering the development of adaptation studies. This issue is at the heart of contemporary debates. By expanding the theoretical model of adaptation to the field of cultural studies and the cultural history of the contemporary on the one hand, and trying to complement the more conventional paradigms of semiotics or translation studies on the other, current studies of adaptation attempt to offer an approach to the phenomenon in less binary terms.² All of them highlight the need for adaptation as one of the basic practices of media culture, including notably innovation and serialization,³ or of the centrality of adaptation in a so-called “convergence culture” where it is no longer possible to confine a work to the form of its medium.⁴ Today, adaptation truly is everywhere, and the works themselves can only survive if they constantly migrate from one medium to another.

Oeuvre as Adaptation, Adaptation as Oeuvre

In this analysis, I begin by tackling the question of adaptation obliquely, casting it in a transdisciplinary⁵ mold by reading it through a wholly different field, i.e., music studies. More specifically, my starting point is Peter Szendy’s book Écoute : Une histoire de nos oreilles, whose importance to a new approach to adaptation I deem fundamental. What is Szendy’s argument? First, that music only exists by virtue of listening, which produces it—and, of course, we readily say as much about texts or comics, where reading is not a secondary operation (which is, of course, a truism). The text must be read, as actively as possible, much in the same way as music should be listened to and not merely heard. Secondly, that listening to music seems, at first, to be an immaterial process. Nonetheless, it is possible to grasp it indirectly through its adaptations. These are manifold, and Szendy gives varied examples: the arrangements, transcriptions, performances (private or public), recordings, or reproductions, notably with the help of all kinds of machines, ranging from the overly crude to those of unprecedented sophistication. Again, the analogies with textual practices are obvious, even trivial, yet it is evident that such observations have considerable impact on the theory of adaptation, warranting our attention.

Szendy’s ideas on listening to music radically transform the status of adaptation. They prioritize the following five issues:

1. Adaptation is necessary. Without it, no reading is possible, and in the absence of reading, no text or work is thinkable. Adaptation can, therefore, not be relegated to the margins of the work. If it represents a marginal effect of the work, then it must also occupy the center itself, in the manner of the Derridean supplement. It must be stressed straight away that a simple reading is not equivalent to adaptation, as the latter always involves the idea of change and transformation—in short, an intervention in the text.

2. In essence, what exists is not the work but the adaptation. Put differently: adaptation is not only that which “reveals” the work retrospectively; it constitutes the work itself, which exists only as a chain or network of ceaseless transformations. Instead of the opposition and division between the adapted work and the work of adapting, it is thus more fitting to think of a set of variations in which the concepts of the adapted and the adapting lose part of their value. Any adapted work can also constitute an adaptation. Any adaptation can also be adapted.

3. Although the adaptation process takes place in a chain, it is not necessarily linear. Ever since Borges’s famous text on Kafka, we know that writers invent or create their own precursors, at least in the eyes of their readers, and this phenomenon should include adaptation. We can read the original works as adaptations, which is, in effect, something we are doing more and more: to read a novel today is also to imagine the film that could have been its adaptation.⁶ In general, one could argue that the current reading practice has become an adaptive reading; we increasingly see the works we are faced with as adaptations (although we do not always have a clear idea of the work they adapt), all the while having in mind the adaptations that could be made in turn (even if the hypotheses we make remain quite vague).⁷ The approach holds true in another register, and a theoretically less stimulating fashion, for the many modern writers influenced by cinema (which they adapt) are eager to be adapted to the screen (to the point that they write with the screenplay that could be drawn from their work in mind). Can we really imagine Stephen King writing his new novel without already thinking of a potential future film version?

4. The phenomena of adaptation are not technical processes, even though technique does play a major role. Adaptations are primarily cultural facts, that is to say, they are practices saturated with values, some of which are positive (e.g., when the adaptation is intended to pay homage to the person or work one adapts), while others are negative (as when the adaptation is seen as reflecting a lack of originality on the part of whoever is adapted). Adaptation is not just something one can name or identify; it is, first and foremost, something to be judged or something inviting the assessment of judgments that determine the stakes.

5. The field of adaptation is much larger and more varied than generally accepted. A number of textual practices can, indeed, be read as belonging to the process of adaptation, like the transition from manuscript to typescript and the final published work, or to take an example typical of traditional comics, the move from pencil drawing to ink drawing and then to the final colored version. That every textual action is a form of adaptation is a fascinating hypothesis, but one which is not without risk. Indeed, if everything is an adaptation, then nothing is.⁸ It is therefore necessary to limit with some degree of accuracy our use of the term adaptation so as not to lose the pertinence of the analysis.

What I propose, here, is to use the concept of adaptation to re-examine some classic problems in comics studies. Often, the issue of adaptation—especially the adaptation of literary works into comics—is posed in terms of cultural legitimation, whereby the lower system (comics) taps into the stronger system (literature) for considerations of prestige and the increase of symbolic capital.⁹ For various reasons, this motivation is no longer valid. First, on account of a loss of hierarchical markers; literature has ceased to have the same prestige it once did, and thanks to the graphic novel, comics are encroaching on its terrain (as we all know, the most-studied French author in American universities is Marjane Satrapi). Secondly, owing to the widespread phenomenon of adaptation, transmedial transitions have become less conspicuous (it is no longer obvious that analyzing a film adaptation of a novel implies having read or even being familiar with the source).

That said, the trivialization of adaptation and the cultural erosion of the literary repertoire raise other major institutional issues, many of which touch upon the question of the author. In what follows, I will mainly explore the relationship between style and the stance of the writer,¹⁰ and the way in which this relationship is often the object of value judgments. Indeed, in comics, the style—at least the graphic style—does not always make the man. Some creators develop a personal work while using a relatively neutral style; conversely, the adoption of a highly personal style is not a guarantee that the public will recognize an author in the full sense of the term.¹¹ As a corollary, the link between originality and value is more complex in comics than, for instance, in literature. In literature, the clear boundary between restricted and expanded production tends to favor innovation and originality. With comics, which are closer to the industry and broader market, it is not as easy to determine.

In the context of adaptation, these problems are both fundamental and ubiquitous. Three basic situations can be distinguished, which will be examined in the following analysis: (1) original works that are apparently not adapted; (2) works that are multifaceted and anything but homogeneous, which are the result of adaptation, literary or otherwise; and (3) mixed works that may present themselves as adaptations as well as original creations, whose continuations are a widely recognized example in comics.

Originality and Adaptation

Again, we must keep in mind that every work is an adaptation. But what is the use of such a statement to analyze actual works that do not seem derived from any other source? How can the original work be described in terms of an adaptation?

As noted above, every production involves an element of self-adaptation. The author transforms an idea, style, form, or structure in order to create a first, still wholly virtual draft, leading to a completed (but never definitively closed-off) work. Sometimes, however, this process becomes public and manifest. In the case of “the alterations by the author,” for instance, this fairly conventional form of self-adaptation, in which an author judges himself, has immediate effects on the way the author is judged by the public. A correction judged successful will be credited to the author; a good example would be The Walls of Samaris (1982), the inaugural volume in the Obscure Cities series by Peeters and Schuiten. When the correction is deemed unfortunate, it will stain the author’s reputation—think of the different versions of The Black Island (1937), which continue to plunge Tintin fans in the depths of despair. In all of these cases, the object of judgment goes beyond the more or less local transformations in the works and is extended to the larger issue of the writer’s stances. For what is judged in these works that initially appear to be “original” is the way in which the author demonstrates discernment and skill at self-adaptation, and more precisely the way in which the adaptation in question can be related to the self-positioning of the artist in the artistic or cultural field. The fact that Hergé made a “bad” self-adaptation is seen as selling out to the pressures of the market; that Peeters and Schuiten made a “good” self-adaptation will be interpreted as a sign of artistic integrity.

This may seem trivial, but it becomes more complex when taking into account that self-adaptation, far from merely registering the strategic considerations of the artist, is increasingly becoming a necessity where the role of the public is anything but passive or purely reactive. As such, the practice of self-adaptation is not only proof of the author’s concern with changing the image he fashions of himself, but also meets the demands of the readers, who, far from merely awaiting this type of self-adaptation, set out to appropriate it.

This can be observed, first, in the audience’s reactions to the lack of self-adaptation. An oblique illustration of this same strategy is the reprint, which the public often expects to be accompanied by self-adaptation. For modern audiences, an author who “evolves” can no longer take the liberty of leaving an older work untouched, especially with a work that was not yet up to the standards of the author’s current production. The Obscure Cities series, which evolves with each re-edition, is a case in point; for them, reprints are always the occasion for improvements. Similarly, and conversely, the artist is permitted with less and less frequency to revise a work deemed satisfactory by the readers. The refusal or inability to self-adapt can sometimes be met with the readers’ rather vicious judgments. The latter are no longer content with merely criticizing works as they are found on the market; they now assume the right to demand real changes, a telltale sign of the new context in which the discussion of adaptation is now taking place. The phenomenon is certainly not new and has not changed in nature, yet it has certainly changed its source. In a culture where adaptation becomes the norm, ne varietur ceases to be the privilege of producers (and authors and publishers alike—think of the decisive role they played at all stages of Hergé’s career). From now on, it is also the reader—and increasingly only s/he alone—who wants to have a say in the final cut.

This is even more clearly the case in fan culture, where readers set out to make self-adaptations in place of the author, the technical means of new media having toppled copyright barriers; consider the many examples of “fan fiction” (although this phenomenon mainly concerns the third basic category in my typology, i.e., continuations). The trend towards adaptation is thus no longer limited to works in progress or future works; it equally—and often bluntly—touches upon those of the past. That the audience is getting used to reading a work as both adapted and adaptable further reinforces this loss of stable points of reference (icons of popular culture such as Batman and Tarzan are good illustrations of this; readers no longer recognize the chronological relations between novels, comics, movies, series, novelizations, etc., as they also believe that the subject matter belongs to anyone willing to seize it). And as soon as a work is considered...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Adapting Adaptation Studies to Comics Studies
• Part I: From Page to Panel
• Part II: From Panel to Screen and Back Again
• Contributors
• Index