Jul 08 2011

Fantasy Comics Adaptations of Classic Literature

And when I say “fantasy” I don’t mean “chicks in chain-mail being rescued from dragons”– I mean fantasy as in “fantasy football.” Here’s the background for this post: a while back, cartoonist Scott Chantler (of the excellent recent graphic novel, Two Generals, among other things) put out a call on Twitter asking other cartoonists what book they would most like to do a comics adaptation of. If you know me and follow my blog, you know what my answer was: The Count of Monte Cristo. Some of the responses from other cartoonists, though, got me thinking about comics adaptations I’d really like to see.

So, just for fun here are a few of my “fantasy picks” for comics adaptations of some of my favorite books:

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick – Adapted by Tony Millionaire and Kevin Huizenga

OK, I know there’re a ton of comics adaptations of Moby Dick–from the venerable Classics Illustrated version to an interpretation by Will Eisner–but frankly none of them (that I’ve read, anyway) manage to get it quite right. From the versions I’ve looked at (and there are for sure some that I’ve not read but should have, like the Bill Sienkiewicz adaptation) they seem to suffer from one or all of these three problems:

Drawing that doesn’t capture the tone of the novel – The tone of Moby Dick, both the narrative and the writing itself, is an odd combination of ornateness and grittiness. The drawing style of a comics adaptation of the book should reflect this tone and evoke it visually. I took a glance at some recent Marvel adaptation of the book and, despite the artist being an excellent draftsman, the art style looked like it would have been right at home in an issue of Deadpool. Even the great Will Eisner gets the tone of the book totally off-the-mark:

Complete lack of humor – OK, so Moby Dick isn’t a wacky laugh-a-minute gag-fest, but there is some humor in it. I think that the book’s status as a piece of CLASSIC LITERATURE makes people assume that it’s got to be dull-as-dirt serious. It isn’t. There are definitely some funny bits. The whole bit where Ishmael and Queequeg first meet at The Spouter-Inn (chapters three and four, maybe?) is hilarious. Even one of the books main images, Ahab on-deck with his peg-leg anchoring him in place via various “auger holes” he’s had drilled in the deck, is pretty funny.

Excising the non-“whale action” parts – For some reason people’s natural impulse when thinking about adapting this book is to completely remove anything that’s not a part of the main narrative about Ahab and the whale. Even the blog post I nabbed that Eisner image from contains this quote, about how readily-adaptable the book is: “You can leave out the chapters on rope, ruminations on predestination, and zero in on the story of one man trying to kill a whale.” No, no! Please don’t. That stuff is about half of the book and it’s a huge part of what makes the book as great as it truly is. Take it out and you’ve basically got an 1800s version of The Hunt for Red October. I think people avoid this because they think about adapting a book for comics as if they were adapting a book for film. They’re not the same thing. Comics can handle the historical/philosophical rumination–and any decent adaptation of Moby Dick has got to have that stuff left in.

Fortunately there’s an (imaginary) fix for all of the above. The first two issues could be solved in one fell swoop by getting the great Tony Millionaire on-board for art chores. His artwork has a perfect scrimshaw-ish look that’d be great for this story:

His Maakies strip is dark and funny at the same time; he’s a master of pathos. As far as the visual style goes, Millionaire is capable of modulating his style to fit the tone of whatever story he’s working on. Witness the various visual incarnations of his Uncle Gabby and Drinky Crow characters that appear in various forms in everything from charming children’s books to the often-raunchy Maakies.

To “solve” the third issue mentioned above, I’d bring in Kevin Huizenga to do the actual adapting of the work into breakdowns/thumbnails. Kevin’s truly amazing at using the language of comics to communicate complex philosophical and theological concepts. Here’s an example where his character, Glen Ganges, sort of mentally travels through time  Richard McGuire-style as he returns from the library:

I think Kevin would could really dig in and do some interesting things with all those historical and philosophical digressions and Tony Millionaire’s art would look amazing. Heck, there’s already even a Tony Millionaire book jacket for an edition of the novel:

John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat – Adapted by Mark Martin

I run hot and cold on John Steinbeck. I found things like The Pearl, and even The Grapes of Wrath, hard to get through because of Steinbeck’s heavy-handed moralizing throughout. On the other hand, I really enjoy some of his more humorous work like Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, one of my absolute favorite books.

I’m going to grant, for the sake of this blog post, that you could even get away with a comics adaptation of Tortilla Flat in today’s socio-political climate. The book’s basically about a group of extremely lazy (but quite noble in their own way) Hispanic men in Monterey, California whose life-goal is mainly to stay as drunk as possible. It’s an incredibly funny book and even more-so because Steinbeck has all the characters speaking in an odd Arthurian phrasing. The chapter titles–like “How Danny was ensnared by a vacuum cleaner and how Danny’s friends rescued him”–are straight out of  The Tales of King Arthur. The book reads like Thomas Mallory narrating a Cheech and Chong movie.

There’s regrettably a somewhat short list of people that come to mind in the modern cartooning world when you think “funny.” Johnny Ryan is one for sure, but his over-the-top gross-out humor (as much as I love it!) isn’t really what’s needed here. Tortilla Flat calls for someone who can do fall on the floor funny but who can also give these characters the sort of goofy, noble charm they have in the novel. The answer is Mark Martin.

Sadly, Mark Martin isn’t as much of a household name cartooning-wise as he really should be. He’s probably best known for his Batman parody character from the 80s, Gnatrat. He’s an amazing cartoonist, though, and incredibly funny. When I imagine a Mark Martin Tortilla Flat, I think of his flat-out hilarious Montgomery Wart stories:

He’s clearly got the cartooning (and timing) chops to pull of the more madcap parts of the story (which is most of it), but he can also do imagery that moody and beautifully rendered. Imagine the early 30s Monterey of Tortilla Flat drawn like this–gorgeous!

“But, wait,” you’re saying, “All that guy’s characters are, like, these weird frog creatures.” You know what? I’m cool with that. Do the adaptation with animals. It worked for Art Spiegelman, right?

Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South – Adapted by Christophe Blain

Yeah, I guess you don’t usually hear folks say, “Melville, Steinbeck…. Portis.” But you should! Charles Portis is one of my favorite modern writers. He’s got a small but amazing body of work, much of which unbelievably was out of print for a long time. Recently (thankfully) he’s come back into the limelight a bit due to the success of the Coen Brothers adaptation of his best-known work, True Grit. Any of Portis’s books could potentially make for an interesting adaptation to a visual medium. If I’d been picking the Portis novel for the Coen Brothers to adapt (curiously, no one asked me) I’d probably not have picked True Grit. I’d love to have seen an over-the-top film version of Portis’s hilarious conspiracy theory send-up, Masters of Atlantis, done Raising Arizona/Big Lebowski style. For a comics adaptation, though, I’d pick my absolute favorite Portis novel, The Dog of the South.

For art duty, I’d pick the extraordinary French cartoonist Christophe Blain. The Dog of the South is a classic American road novel and you may be thinking, Why the heck would you get a French cartoonist to do a novel so steeped in Americana?! Gus and his Gang: that’s why.

Gus and his Gang is the most recent of Blain’s work to be translated into English and published domestically. It’s Blain’s take on the Old West–and it’s amazing. Part of what makes Gus so interesting is the unique approach that Blain–a non-American–has taken to this very American of subjects: where most of us Americans would probably have approached in the typical “sheriffs, hold-ups, and gunfights” fashion, Blane produced a book that uses those trappings to tell a story about a group of womanizing friends.

Blain also has a great feel for the subtle humor of character interaction, and The Dog of the South would be a great place to showcase that, with its classic “naïve protagonist traveling with rogue companion” premise. The characters in the book travel from Little Rock, Arkansas to Belize. In Gus, Blain did an amazing job drawing Old West-era America; I’d love to see him tackle more contemporary (Dog of the South takes place modern times, circa mid-70s) settings.  Here’re a few samples from Gus—Imagine!

OK, I could go on like this a while, picking “fantasy comics adaptations”… I won’t though. But, I’d love to hear yours!

Jul 05 2011

Portrait Night 7/5 (Henry Rollins)

Tonight’s #PortraitNight subject is Black Flag front-man and Professional Angry Guy Henry Rollins. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about ol’ Hank these days since I’m reading Our Band Could be Your Life. It’s easy to razz Rollins for is often over-the-top anger/bitterness, but he’s a pretty smart guy and some of the things he had to say back in the Black Flag days are surprisingly applicable today:

“There’s a lot of people with a lot of fury in this country–America is seething at all times. It’s like a Gaza Strip that’s three thousand miles long.”

If you’d like to suggest a #PortraitNight subject, you can do so either via the comments section here, or via my Twitter.

Jul 04 2011

N is for Narwhal

You can follow the other “N” entries as people post them to Twitter this morning by following the #AnimalAlphabet hashtag. To see all the entries so far, check out the Animal Alphabet Tumblr: http://animalalphabet.tumblr.com.

N is for Narwhal

The original art for this is for sale here.

Jul 03 2011

Defending the Honorable Art of Cartooning on WBEZ’s Sound Opinions

Hey, I’m on this week’s Sound Opinions, defending the honorable art of cartooning! I love the podcast and listen every week, so it was really fun to have them pick my phoned-in comments to run on the air.

Last week they made some offhand remark along the lines of “if your songs can’t make the cut for a cartoon, something’s wrong” during their review if the new My Morning Jacket record and I felt compelled to call in.

I’m surprised they ran it because I really rambled on. They wisely edited it down a bit. Two of the folks that I mentioned as comics/cartooning “crossovers” that they edited out were Archer Prewitt of the band The Sea and the Cake (who also does the hilarious Sof’ Boy comic) and Bob Dorough who did a lot of the music for Schoolhouse Rock including my favorite one music-wise, “Little Twelve Toes.”

I was for some reason incredibly nervous calling in, and therefore sound a bit like the teenage “I dropped your taco in the fryer, Mr. Simpson” kid from The Simpsons. My rant begins at about 55:45.

Here’s a link to the show: 6/24/11 Sound Opinions

Here’s the full text of my original rant: Rant

Jul 02 2011

The (Not So) Secret Origin of Queequeg

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of my absolute favorite novels and I’m definitely not the only cartoonist with an affinity for it. Most famously among us “indie” types is probably Jeff Smith’s homage to Moby Dick in his series Bone. In it, Moby Dick is the favorite book of one of the characters, Fone Bone, and there’s a running gag in which every time Fone begins reading from it all the other characters instantly fall asleep. There’s even a scene in which Fone imagines himself as Captain Ahab.

It’s a different Moby Dick character, though, that I’ve been thinking about comics-wise of late: Queequeg, the heavily-tattooed South Pacific Islander who’s the chief harpooner aboard the Pequod. Much to my delight, there’s been an explosion of nautical-themed graphic novels of late, and it seems like it’s now almost required that if you’re going to do an 1800s nautical book, that you’ve got to have a character who’s a Queequeg homage. Here, for example, is a Pacific Islander character from the great all-ages nautical adventure The Unsinkable Walker Bean:

And of course, there’s my own personal homage to Queequeg, Tevia from my Oyster War webcomic:

I only recently learned, though, that the character Queequeg himself was a bit of an homage–to a real person.

I just finished reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Sea of Glory, a really great history of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. The Ex. Ex. (as it was called) was a truly spectacular globe-spanning surveying and exploring expedition that took place from 1838 to 1842. The Ex. Ex., though, was mired in controversy almost from the moment planning stages began and it has since been largely lost to history despite its many remarkable accomplishments, among them the exploration and mapping of nearly three hundred Pacific islands, mapping over eight hundred miles of the Oregon coast, the recovery of over 60,000 bird and plant specimens, and the eventual founding of the Smithsonian Institution.

Interestingly, though, Herman Melville was apparently very influenced by Charles Wilkes’s (the Expedition’s leader) written account of the expedition, Narrative, written in 1845. While Sea of Glory points out a number of things from the expedition that appear directly or indirectly in Moby Dick (and apparently this is common knowledge among Melville folks–hence the “not so” in this post’s title) as a cartoonist I was particularly interested to hear how influential one of Narrative‘s illustrations was–that of an islander encountered by the expedition  that was apparently the origin of Melville’s character Queequeg. Thanks to the magic of Google Books, here it is:

I found this really fascinating partially because it makes a sort of “full circle” with a drawing influencing a prose novel which then influences (cartoonists’) drawings. Also, though, it’s an interesting example of  image as inspiration. Conveniently forgetting that the near-total separation of words and pictures in literature is a relatively recent phenomenon, many people tend to make a hierarchical division between them with words being the inspiration and pictures being illustrations of those words.  But here’s a great example where one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite prose books has his origin squarely in my “home turf”: drawings.