ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies

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Fidelity and Period Aesthetics in Comics Adaptation

By Matthew Bolton 1 The most basic formal feature of comics is the simultaneous presentation of verbal and iconographic language: words and pictures. This will be a common observation to anyone who is familiar with comics scholarship, and in particular with this journal, whose name comes from W. J. T. Mitchell's term for "composite, synthetic worksthat combine image and text" (89). Indeed, much comics scholarship takes this formal feature as the particular object of its study, examining and unpacking the cognitive, aesthetic, and thematic effects that arise from the friction between word and image, and it is this friction that I take as my subject. However, rather than focusing on comics' dual-track narration as an end in itself, I want to suggest that this feature makes comics a uniquely productive (if underappreciated) site for the study of adaptation. The force of comics' blend of image and word is especially felt in regards to one of the most troublesome concepts in adaptation theory: fidelity. In addition, I argue that the particular case studies I discuss belowJason's The Left Bank Gang[1] and Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli's City of Glasseach exploit the intersections between original and adaptation, word and image in order both to demonstrate a respectful loyalty to their source materials and to recast these source materials according to the cultural dominants of postmodernism. By having it both ways in this manner, these artists demonstrate the inability of the fidelity model to account for comic adaptations' hybrid form. 2 In Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Kamilla Elliott argues that the history of adaptation studies has been shaped largely by the dispute between the categorical and analogical approaches. The categorical approach emphasizes the unbreakable link (some would say the identity) between form and content, placing visual and verbal arts into emphatically distinct categories and calling on artists to recognize the limitations of their media and to strive to work within these boundaries. This critical paradigm conceives of fidelity as an impossible dream, kept always just out of reach by the limitations of each medium's formal affordances. Opposed to

this view, the analogical approach focuses instead on the cross-pollination between the visual and the verbal, regularly adopting the critical terms of one aesthetic form to discuss another.[2] This camp argues that an adapter can realize the facts of a source text as metaphors, gesturing obliquely at the original as a way of remaining faithful to it. 3 Elliott positions herself within this debate with reference to film adaptations of novels, but comics are particularly situated to nuance the focus on fidelity and on the relation between word and image. The fact that all comics texts combine both halves of the word/image divide into a single text troubles the categorical paradigm's strict separation between the two; indeed, the very existence of the speech balloonan iconographic union of word and image which David Carrier claims is one of the two innovations fundamental to the comics aesthetic (along with the narrative sequencing of images)seems to deflate the categorical effort to keep these realms separate.[3] In addition, the existence of two distinct narrative tracks in comics creates a larger issue for the notion of fidelity, as each line of communication can have varying degrees of fidelity to the source text. As we shall see, this hybrid narration provides an opportunity for comics artists to be faithful to the source material they adapt, while at the same time bringing their own innovations to their adaptation. 4 Turning first to Jason's Left Bank Gang, we must begin by addressing how this revisionist history can be said to be faithful in any way to its historical sources, which include biographical materials, photographs, and anecdotes about the modernist writers of the Parisian Left Bank.[4] After all, the work is transparently fictional, featuring an elaborate heist (complete with double- and triple-crossings) attempted by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, who are depicted as anthropomorphic cartoon dogs, a motif which appears throughout Jason's work.[5] As such, this seems like the last text one would bring to a discussion about fidelity. After all, even if an unbelievably credulous and illinformed reader takes as historical fact that Joyce, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Sartre were all killed in a bungled robbery in 1920s Paris, this misreader will at least guess that these historical figures were not talking dogs. Surely, one thinks, this would've been covered in a lit class somewhere along the way. 5 Nevertheless, putting this cosmetic difference aside, Jason quickly demonstrates to readers with a passing familiarity with literary history that he has done his homework, filling the first half of The Left Bank Gang with familiar depictions of the 1920s modernist circle. We see Scott and Zelda drink endlessly and squabble even more, followed inevitably by Scott's complaining to Hemingway. Scott also alludes to having his portrait shot by Man Ray, grouses impatiently about the French, and summarily dismisses Stein's comics work as "shit" (22). (In Jason's text, all of the writers, in addition to being dogs, produce comics instead of prose. For the record, Joyce finds her work "unreadable," while Pound "kind of like[s]" it

[ibid.].) Hemingway, on the other hand, spends his days seated at the feet of a sage Stein, chatting with Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, diligently working on his own comics, and spending time with wife Hadley and son Bumby. 6 In addition to recreating the general atmosphere of the Left Bank relationships, Jason also integrates specific anecdotes into his narrative. Two examples involving Hemingway will suffice to demonstrate the larger trend. First, Jason depicts Fitzgerald and Hemingway in a bar, with Fitzgerald confiding to Hemingway his fears of sexual inadequacy stemming from Zelda's constant deprecations, especially about the size of his penis. Hemingway gamely offers to give Fitzgerald a second opinion, and the two adjourn to the restroom to view the evidence. After Hemingway tells him that "[i]t's completely normal" and "just fine the way it is," they go to a museum to further set Fitzgerald's mind at ease by taking an inventory of the male nudes on display (16). Though the scene seems too parodic to be true, the entire sequence is taken directly from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, from the chapter drolly titled "A Matter of Measurements." Hemingway's version further specifies Michaud's and the Louvre as the locations and supplies some comforting advice on the foreshortening effects of Fitzgerald's bird's-eye perspective on the penis in question, but the spirit of the anecdote is essentially the same in both accounts.[6] 7 In a similar example, Jason later depicts Hemingway at a park feeding pigeons with Bumby. Hemingway lures a bird close enough to eat from his hand, then quickly breaks its neck. Scooping it up, he conceals it in his pocket before suggesting to his son that they "go home and have supper" (21). The scene ends when Bumby and Ernest's stroll home is interrupted by a woman calling for help and a purse snatcher fleeing. Aside from this last detail, which Jason supplies to illustrate the origin of Hemingway's heist plot, this scene is taken directly from Hemingway's own remembrances from a letter to fellow author A. E. Hotchner: On days when the dinner pot was absolutely devoid of content, I would put Bumby, then about a year old, into the baby carriage and wheel him over here to the Jardin. There was always a gendarme on duty, but I knew that around four o'clock he would go to a bar across from the park to have a glass of wine. That's when I would appear with Mr. Bumbyand a pocketful of corn for the pigeons. I would sit on a bench, in my guise of buggy-pushing pigeon-lover, casing the flock for clarity of eye and plumpness. The Luxembourg was well known for the classiness of its pigeons. Once my selection was made, it was a simple matter to entice my victim with the corn, snatch him, wring his neck, and flip his carcass under Mr. Bumby's blanket. We got a little tired of pigeon that winter, but they filled many a void (quoted in Hotchner 45). 8 Here again, we see Jason foregrounding his faithfulness to his source material by integrating a significant piece of Left Bank and Hemingway mythos into his text.[7] By choosing anecdotes like this and the previous one, Jason builds a trust with the

implied audience that recognizes his allusions to the biographies of these historical figurestrust that provides a foundation for the fantastic leaps that follow. 9 Before we turn to Jason's alternate history, however, it is worth mentioning one other way that Jason establishes The Left Bank Gang's fidelity, one more reliant on the comic's visual track. In addition to the representation of the Left Bank relationships and specific anecdotes, Jason also inserts the modernists' texts into his own work. By this I mean not simply alluding to them, though Jason does that as well; in addition to the discussion of Stein's work mentioned above, Hemingway discusses having his comic "A Very Short Story" rejected by Vanity Fair, and the gang discusses the merits of Jason's fellow Norwegian Knut Hamsun's The Growth of the Soil.[8] On top of these allusions, however, Jason reproduces visually a handful of modernist texts in ways that are recognizable to an audience familiar with these authors. First, Jason twice shows detailed panels of Hemingway working on his comics. The first (Fig. 1) occurs just after a title-cardstyle panel establishing the setting as "Paris, the Latin Quarter, sometime in the 1920s" (3). A sequence of three panels shifts the readers rapidly across fictional levels from a close-up of the setting of Hemingway's comic, then to the panel Hemingway is working onhis hand in the foreground retroactively establishing that the first panel is indeed a text within the textand finally to a reverse angle that shows Hemingway working at his desk.[9]