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Underground > Comic Books >

Dream-up books into comical books.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

01:58 / 19.10.05

Went trawling through the old threads and couldn't find one that quite went into what I wanted, but I might have been looking in the wrong places. I was thinking about that adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass a while back and how it changed from the book itself, how the intepretation and revisioning of it affected the story. Thought about what other books would be interesting if filtered through a funny book lens.

As an example, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It wouldn't work in black and white, I don't think, but I'm not entirely sure a comic book would quite work either. I kept imagining it as a really, really thick picture book rendition with the text overlaid by images - in my head it's done by Shaun Tan, who did picture books called The Rabbits and The Red Tree, with slim-panelled comic format for the interlude sections with Kubla Khan and Marco Polo - long, spindly fingers and light speech balloons with a rounded font. I think in the end it would be more of a sprawling art book, but I like the idea of having comic-stuctured sequences in between the vast panoramas, with text playfully arranged.

Any other ideas?

03:25 / 19.10.05

In Grade 10 we had to read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and rather than read it, I took out a smaller, pocket sized comic-book version of it. It actually helped me out alot, being a visual-learner.

Personally, I'd love to read a graphic adaptation of Dr. Sylvia Rimm's classic See Jane Win.

04:11 / 19.10.05

'Finnegans Wake', the Joyce thing. Yes. Jam, full of different artists, even drawing atop and around each other's work. In full, partial, and often absurd color with a variety of pen-widths and so forth. And a diecut cover with Wolverine on it.
A selection of random (or semi-random, anyway) W.S. Burroughs routines, put into sequential imagery might be interesting. Particularly in a 'draw that, fucker!' sort of way...
and so, Lovecraft stories, too. I mean done right.
Lawrence Durrell's 'Justine' and its three angles, could be perfectly wonderfully splendid as comics. Swoon. Sigh. Re-swoon. Drawn by Jill Thompson and colored by Lynn Varley, in a very willowy, elegant, and painfully close to breaking style.

07:31 / 19.10.05

Martin Rowson has done a graphic novel adaptation of Tristram Shandy, another book that you wouldn't necessarily think of as lending itself to adaptation...

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

15:36 / 19.10.05

Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates, as drawn by Seth Fisher. I think you'd lose so much of the original intentions of the story, all the linguistic games, but I think Fisher would serve well for the hallucinatory story-within-story-within-the-same-story acrobatics. Part of the reason I liked the idea of adapting books was the potential to change the focus a bit.

17:05 / 19.10.05

Philip K. Dick´s UBIK. An awesome story, that has it all: cryogenics, conspiracy, moon bases, terrorism, telepathy and anti-telepathy, time-travel and weirdness galore. And of course...Ubik.

Walt Simonson could be the one to draw it, in the style of his awesome Thor (337 - ?) comics.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:30 / 19.10.05

A whole book of PKD adaptations would be really quite cool; different artists interpreting the hallucinatory, ragged style...

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:47 / 19.10.05

In relation to the most recent Klarion: Frazer Irving on an H.P. Lovecraft story, although I've got a book of Lovecraft comics, so I'd go a step further and suggest an adaptation of one of the short stories from the "Shadows over Baker Street" anthology (various writers giving a go at Sherlock Holmes and the Old Ones).

For some reason, I like the idea of a Madame Bovary comic.

18:43 / 19.10.05

I think the right artist could take William Least Heat Moon's descriptive prose in Blue Highways and turn out some great images.

I don't know who that artist is.

19:48 / 19.10.05

Papers - have you not seen Gemma Bovery?

19:51 / 19.10.05

Oh and if you like Frazer Irving's cthulhu stylings you could check out his work on Caballistics (a kind of 1920s LOEG) or Fort (A comic about Charles Fort)...

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

22:19 / 19.10.05

Now I remember hearing about Gemma Bovary, but nay, I've never read. I'll try and track it down. The Caballistics and Fort both sound good. Or at the very least interesting.

04:20 / 20.10.05

This guy named David Lasky did a comic adaptation of Ulysses "Kirby-style'". I've never actually seen it anywhere, though. I found a pic of the cover here.

07:23 / 20.10.05

I got that Ulysses comic, and had completely forgotten about it. I just flipped through the pages, and it´s the early Hulk/Fantastic Four Kirby style. Just looking at it, it seems to be a real labour of love (and it´s in near mint condition

).

07:41 / 20.10.05

Apparently, Hunt Emmerson has produced an adaptation of john Ruskin's How to be Rich... details here...

13:40 / 20.10.05

Unbearable Lightness of Being, drawn by Milo Manara.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:18 / 20.10.05

Has anyone here ever read Sheila Heti's The Middle Stories? A book of short and short-short stories in the urban fairy tale vein to some extent, although I'm not sure I could even describe them as singularly in that genre. I was thinking about it as a comic by Mignola; the one specifically I'm thinking about is a story of a boy who falls in love with and marries a monkey. There's also a story about a kid keeping a miniature mermaid trapped in a jar. I can picture it in my head with a lot of moody Mignola panel layouts and the faintly surreal air of some of his quieter Hellboy stories.