Derivative Works

The latest New York Times bestseller list for hardcover comics includes adaptations of the Book of Genesis (#1), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (#2), and Pride and Prejudice (#5). The seven “original” books are all about Batman and the Joker (four titles), the X-Men (two), and Green Lantern (one)—additions to superhero sagas that have been running for decades.

That leaves all the original comics stories on the paperback bestseller list. Even there, however, there are two more Batman titles, Bill Willingham’s mashup of traditional fairy tales and the modern world in Fables, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, originally inspired by the Charlton superheroes.

The number of adaptations and sequels reflects yet another difference I’ve noticed separating prose literature from similar books in comics form: the comics world is more respectful toward derivative works. Publishers Weekly just ran a whole story about adaptations of literary classics into comics form, along with a list of recent and upcoming titles.

Thus, in the comics world, people praise Jon J. Muth’s adaptation of Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang's screenplay for M as a graphic novel, and it is quite striking. Critics don’t respect prose “novelizations” of movies the same way—even novelizations that do a good job of storytelling.

Artist P. Craig Russell just adapted Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters into comics form. No one seemed to ask what’s significant about adapting a story written just ten years ago and published with many illustrations into a graphic novel. Rather, the review site IGN praised it as “as faithful an adaptation as one could ever hope for.”

In contrast, when novelists with literary ambitions rewrite older stories or obviously build on them, they usually present themselves as not just adapting the material for a new form or audience, but reworking it to make a new statement. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a post-colonialist prequel to Jane Eyre. Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar is a feminist version of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (which in turn had traveled to the same territory as Jules Verne’s Deux Ans de Vacances, but dystopically).

Occasionally a literary novelist will build on popular culture, but almost always with post-modern distance and irony, as in Donald Barthelme’s fanfiction. Frederic Tuten’s Tintin in the New World brings Hergé’s cartoon hero together with characters from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in a postmodernist mashup. It’s not just a Tintin story, we readers must understand; it’s about a Tintin story. In contrast, Isabel Allende wrote a sincere swashbuckler in Zorro (2005)—and has her literary reputation recovered, even though that book got good reviews?

TOMORROW: So what?

The Belgian Boy Reporter

Last month The Economist published a detailed discussion of Tintin's place in European culture, in anticipation of a big-budget Hollywood adaptation.

Much of the article is about why Tintin books are supposedly unpopular in the USA. Not just less popular than in Europe, but practically unknown. Which just hasn't been my experience--I've seen Tintin books in American stores for decades.

I've already written about the comic's roots in the anti-Communist Belgian right wing, and how it reflects a colonialist outlook. The Economist article discusses another dimension of bandes dessinées politics, a couple of decades after Tintin's debut:

In 1949 France banned children’s books and comic strips from presenting cowardice in a “favourable” light, on pain of up to a year in prison for errant publishers. It was equally forbidden to make laziness or lying seem attractive. The law created an oversight committee to watch for positive depictions of these ills, along with crime, theft, hatred, debauchery and acts “liable to undermine morality” among the young.

Taken literally, the law suggests that an ideal comic-book hero would resemble an overgrown boy scout, whose adventures involve pluck, fair play, restrained violence and no sex. That is a pretty accurate description of Tintin, the Belgian boy reporter who enjoyed spectacular success in post-war Europe.

Given that Tintin books had been popular for years in neighboring, French-speaking Belgium, I suspect the character was already successful in France before that law. But the new content requirements may indeed have given him a boost by weakening competition.

Those 1949 restrictions came from all over the French political spectrum, the magazine says.

For all the talk about morality, France’s 1949 law on children’s books had ideological roots. It was pushed by an odd alliance of Communists, Catholic conservatives and jobless French cartoonists, determined that French children should be reading works imbued with “national” values. Pascal Ory, a historian at the Sorbonne university (author of “Mickey Go Home. The de-Americanisation of the cartoon strip”), writes that the main aim of the law—which, remarkably, remains in force today, tweaked in the 1950s to add a ban on incitement of ethnic prejudice--was to block comics from America.

Of course, around the time that France enacted this law, comics were becoming a political issue in America as well. In 1954 Sens. Robert Hendrickson and Estes Kefauver held their subcommitte hearings on the comic-book industry. Here too the result was strict guidelines on how mainstream comics depicted of crime, "debauchery," and heroism. But, as usual in America, the censorious authority wasn't the government but the industry regulating itself to preserve its market standing.

A Comics Reading and Reading Comics

Today in New York, Neil Gaiman will appear at a reading of his Sandman comics on the occasion of their twentieth anniversary. The event benefits the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. No, I'm not going to be there, and most likely neither are you since it's a reservations-only event.

I bring this up because it touches on a topic that teachers and parents are probably facing more and more as stories in comics form become accepted as literature.

How, one might ask, does one do a public reading of a comics story? "Okay, we turn the page, and up in this corner we see Jodie looking kind of nervous, and she says, 'What do you mean?' And then the next panel we see--you guys in back might want to come a little closer--we see the whole group from above, and..."

The Sandman event is a dramatic reading, featuring voice actors. And that approach might offer some guidance about how teachers and parents can share graphic novels with children. Because traditional reading-aloud doesn't work well without a narrative voice. The words in comics are more like a script than like a prose story.

The Graphic Classroom has suggested a couple of ways of sharing comics with a whole classroom, including a projector and assigning parts to different students. (This blog also recommends Tiny Titans, featuring a version of Robin. Just in case you thought I'd miss that.)

Comics in the Classroom takes a different approach, finding some comics more suited to the classroom than others:

There are three criteria I judge a book on when bringing into my classroom (honestly, I'll take any appropriate book that I can get my hands on, but only certain ones get the spotlight). The criteria are: Is it visually appealing, is it well written, and can it be read out loud to a group of children? The first two apply to comics, but the third isn't really fair. The Pigeon books [by Mo Willems] are fine for read-a-louds, because there is very little use of panels and the word balloons seem to be written with whole class readings in mind, but the other books in this discussion seem to be written more for the one on one, small group read.

Jim Trelease of The Read-Aloud Handbook has recommended the Tintin books for reading aloud with one or two children at a time ("Because of the size of the pictures"). Hergé's graphics are clear, and his adventures active. I imagine some young readers might like to be responsible for reading certain parts or sound effects while an adult handles the rest of the cast.

Tintin Out of the Congo

In recognition of the announcement of the Cybils Graphic Novels finalists, this will be another COMICS WEEK at Oz and Ends: varied commentary on the comics form.

Last fall, as reported by Publishers Weekly, Little, Brown announced that it had halted its plan to bring out Tintin in the Congo in the US. Britain's Commission for Racial Equality had deemed the same book racist in July. Some US booksellers had raised objections to the title, and Borders had decided to shelve it among graphic novels for adults rather than with the other Tintin comics in the children's section.

Little, Brown's original catalogue announcement had said:

With Herge's centennary upon us in 2007, we are now releasing these three previously unreleased titles. We believe they will be a big hit with avid Tintin fans who have been searching for these titles overseas to complete their collections.

In this adventure, Herge brings Tintin and his faithful dog, Snowy[,] to Africa, where they explore the Belgian Congo. (Note: this particular title, one of three originally unpublished in the U.S., may be considered somewhat controversial, as it reflects the colonial attitudes of the time it was created. Herge depicts African people according to the stereotypes of the time period, but in this edition it will be contextualized for the reader in an explanatory preface.)

Apparently that "explanatory preface" was to be the same that appeared in Egmont's British edition, issued in 2005.

The problem with this "graphic album" is obviously its depiction of Africans as nearly identical, goggled-eyed, thick-lipped, ignorant savages. Such an offensive portrayal isn't surprising, considering that Hergé first created Tintin in the Congo in 1930-31, closer to the period when Belgium brutally instituted the "Congo Free State" as a colony than to us today.

Just as obviously, the choice not to republish this book reflects our present political sensibilities. But the Tintin series was political from the beginning. Hergé's publisher commissioned the first, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929-30), to promote its anti-Communist politics.

Furthermore, we mustn't assume that the book that Little, Brown had planned to release was Hergé's original. The artist himself redrew and colored the book for republication in 1946, and at the time changed some references to Congo as Belgian territory. According to Tintinologist, Tintin in the Congo was further changed in 1975 to erase how Tintin killed a rhinoceros by "by drilling a hole in its back, filling it with gunpowder, and lighting it" after complaints from Scandinavian publishers. So Hergé had adapted his book for contemporary tastes all along.

I wouldn't be surprised if some publishers in 1975 wished they could alter the racist caricatures as easily as they could ask Hergé to revise that rhino episode. But Hergé's versions of Africans appear in many panels on many pages, and he would probably have had to rethink his whole approach to them.

I favor the "explanatory preface" approach to republishing books that reflect old racism, even children's books. However, Tintin in the Congo calls into question how effective that approach would be in a "graphic album." Its problem isn't just some words, which are easily revised, or one or two illustrations, which could be altered or dropped. In a comic with lots of African caricatures, the problem becomes pervasive. And art has a faster, stronger effect on readers than a bit of prose at the start might be able to counteract.

For anyone who wants to own Hergé's Tintin in the Congo as the artist first envisioned it, Last Gasp publishes the original--in black and white, naturally.