A bit of a mystery why they thought it was a good idea ... Detail from the graphic version of Murder on the Orient Express
"I couldn't figure out why on Earth anyone should bother to adapt a book into... another book!" So says the great Art Spiegelman in his introduction to the 1994 graphic novel version of Paul Auster's City of Glass by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. Spiegelmen concludes that this "strange doppelganger of the original book" does justify its existence, but I wonder what he'd think of the present glut of books rethought as comic strips.
The latest are Agatha Christie's, with eight reworkings of whodunnits including Murder on the Orient Express due from HarperCollins. They're intended to "enthral a whole new audience of Christie fans", because apparently two billion books sold just isn't enough. On top of these, Marvel is currently serialising Treasure Island and The Man in the Iron Mask; Classical Comics is soon to provide us with Macbeth, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations. A Manga Bible is already available, endorsed by Rowan Williams.
"The goal here was not to create some dumbed-down 'Classics Illustrated' versions, but visual 'translations' actually worthy of adult attention," writes Spiegelman of City of Glass. I don't think any of these books have such lofty ambitions. They are cravenly literal. Don't expect any new resonances or ambiguities. They have not made Poirot bisexual, or a ninja. This is capitalism at work, not art. If adults are bored with white fridges, sell them a pink fridge; if teenagers are bored with real books, sell them a picture book.
Particularly baffling are Classical Comics' Plain Text and Quick Text versions of Shakespeare plays, in which characters speak in short sentences of one-syllable words. "If you've ever wanted to fully appreciate the works of Shakespeare but find the language rather cryptic, then this is the version for you!" This is like handing someone a vitamin pill and saying, "If you've ever wanted to fully appreciate a banana but find the peeling rather tricky, then this is the version for you!" Getting kids into Shakespeare is good, but if you're going to go to such lengths to conceal what makes Shakespeare worth reading in the first place, what's the point?
The best comics are nearly always the ones that tell a story that could not have been adequately told in any other medium. Straight adaptations are excluded by definition. What's far more interesting is something like Alan Moore's second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a sort of lunatic conspiracy theorist's view of The War of the Worlds, or Neil Gaiman's award-winning issue of Sandman in which a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream is taken over by real imps and fairies. They're not replacements for the originals, they're irreverent tributes.
I'd love to see somebody take a shot at 20th century avant-gardists like William Burroughs, JG Ballard, or Thomas Pynchon. Their books are hallucinogenically vivid, and yet so fragmented and playful as to be unfilmable. Only in a graphic version of The Atrocity Exhibition, for instance, could you show, rather than just describe, the resemblance between an underground car park and Marilyn Monroe's scarred thighs. Again, they wouldn't be replacements, but rather companions, annotations or translations.
