Graphic Novels Discussion #1: Adaptations
22 May 2024
Read the Adaptation graphic novel you've chosen and answer the following questions.
• Tell us the story of how you found your title/material (BRIEFLY). What resources helped you pick your material?
• What is the title/material’s appeal? How does it appeal to the target audience? How can you tell what the target audience is?
• If this is a diverse title: Identify the communities to which the primary character(s) belong(s). Does the author belong to the identity depicted? If not, how accurate is the portrayal to the best of your knowledge? Seek out reviews, blogs, etc. to help with this assessment.
• If you've read/seen the original, what differences are there between the book you chose and its adaptations? How much did the story change? Was that a reasonable change or not?
• What made this particular book a good (or not!) choice for adaptation?
• Is there a book you've read that you'd like to see adapted as a graphic novel? Why or why not?
So, despite all the consideration and deliberate randomness in picking the rest of my reading list, my selection for an adaptation was very much chosen on a whim—that for the first published work of J.R.R. Tolkien’s foundational fantasy series, The Hobbit, adapted by Charles Dixon, Sean Deming, and illustrated by David Wenzel. My first brush with the book was as an assigned reading sometime in early middle school, which usually consigns whatever book was assigned into the never-touch-again-because-of-the-poor-memories pile—but as things turned out, I quite enjoyed The Hobbit, enough to read it again along with the rest of The Lord of the Rings for the first time seven or eight years ago. As such, there were no booklists consulted or otherwise no outside resources that influenced my selection—I wanted to experience The Hobbit again, and the adaptation category provided a nice excuse to do that.
That said, unlike everything else on my list, neither The Hobbit nor its adaptation are recent in any sense of the word. The original novel was first published within the United Kingdom in 1937, and this graphic adaptation, the only one the book has ever received, was originally published in 1989. And novels published before the 21st century, unconstrained as they were by the dwindling attention spans of their audience and/or the publisher-mandated word counts solidifying around them, were crafted with almost no consideration as to what other mediums their work might be molded into.
I don’t think it's controversial to say that graphic novels are expected to be relatively light on words compared to their purely prose counterparts. As Scott McCloud (1994) explains, “traditional thinking has long held that truly great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm’s length,” thus works comprised of the two together like comics are enveloped in impressions denigrating them as lesser that perpetuates itself today (p. 141). McCloud, of course, takes a more enthusiastic perspective on the pair, but, in a later work, also cautions against one taking precedence over the other, particularly with regards to lengthy text dragging a comic into “illustrated prose” territory (2006, p. 143).
For a genre that is infamous for doorstopper-size books with reams of text describing abstract aspects of its setting and narrative, this is a pertinent concern—and as the father of the modern fantasy genre, Tolkien was probably the author to set this precedent! Coupled with comics’ unique considerations as a medium, any adaptation of Tolkien’s legendarium has to seriously consider how to balance the sheer expansiveness of his writing against the constraints of the intended audience, as Pratt (2017) explains:
Written works without images (such as most novels) can be hundreds or even thousands of pages long, and this format allows for the presentation of a massively complicated and deep story in ways that cannot be achieved adequately using the more limited textual and visual space available in comics (p. 232).For all my gesturing towards The Hobbit’s supposed off-putting length, it actually isn’t quite lengthy compared to its modern descendants, telling its tale in around 95,000 words over 276 pages in the 75th anniversary edition. The graphic novel adaptation condenses all that down to 134 pages. For comparison, Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, the seminal fantasy classic of the new millennium, clocks in at about 86,000, and its graphic adaptation pares things down into just 120 pages. Despite their similarities, both the original novel and the graphic adaptation of The Hobbit linger in my impressions as stories that feel quite long—and on a page-to-page level of the graphic novel, too long.
Which isn’t to say The Hobbit’s graphic adaptation is necessarily a bad one. Taking the artwork on its own (and ignoring the cover art on the most recent edition), it’s actually a charming artifact of its era. Wenzel’s adherence to primarily rectangular, symmetrical paneling keeps its presentation straightforward compared to complicated and zanier devices of today, filled with cartoonish-leaning artwork barely a stone’s throw from superhero comics of the time, yet its watercolors and lack of sharp edges convey a gentleness befitting the intended juvenile audience of the original book.
Another holdover from the original contributing to its child-friendly character is its narration, coming from a voice that never explicitly appears in the narrative. This narrator presumably tells the story of The Hobbit from a future, omniscient vantage, interspersing the events of the novel with backstory about a character or creature or any one of their thoughts, in tones ranging from encyclopedically thorough to wryly ironic. As compelling as Tolkien’s melting pot of folkloric tales and mythopoetic scale are on their own, I find that the narration to be The Hobbit’s centerpiece, enough that reframing the novel or even removing it entirely takes away a core aspect of the book. Unlike the most recent, modern movie trilogy counterpart, the graphic novel retains this framing—yet it’s this narration that manages to push The Hobbit’s graphic novel into that “illustrated prose” territory.
To my disappointment, Dixon’s scripting cuts out a lot of the little commentary and anecdotes and ditties that flavor The Hobbit with extra character and whimsy, which that also tamps down on the narration to match, keeping things focused on explicit actions and events. The narration that’s retained is copied word for word into plain boxes, which sometimes contain paragraphs that are just as long as those in this essay! The dialogue, lengthy for our standards, is mirrored as well, and the graphic novel attempts to accommodate both of these elements by making the text quite small—yet shrinking the text does nothing to reduce the inherent density of Tolkien’s (arguably) antiquated prose. Ironically, these choices created the opposite effect McCloud describes: reading the pages of The Hobbit’s graphic novel felt like constantly swapping between narration and dialogue before attaching one or the other to their specific places in the artwork with effort, instead of one seamless experience.
Responding to the aforementioned notion that the space limits of comics make them unsuited for literature adaptations, Pratt would go on to argue that there’s little reason that these can’t be just as long as their source material (p. 235). But as for whether a new graphic novel of The Hobbit with double the pages would make for a better adaptation…I honestly can’t say! Including more of that extra flavor would please me, but adding their respective prose and maintaining the straightforward paneling would probably just add even more density. Although who’s to say that my fatigue with the text is just my expectations brushing up against that of its era? Still, were another team of creators to rise to the challenge of adapting The Hobbit into a graphic novel again, I think they would benefit from using their adaptive artists’ license to retain some of the vibrancy and commentary of the original text, while also attempting to condense some that language into something more alike the juvenile fiction of today.
References
McCloud, S. (2006). Making comics: Storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels. William Morrow.
McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding comics: The invisible art. William Morrow.
Pratt, H. J. (2017). Comics and adaptation. In F. Bramlett, R. Cook, & A. Meskin (Eds.), The Routledge companion to comics (pp. 230-238). Taylor and Francis.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2012). The Hobbit. Mariner Books.
Tolkien, J. R. R., Dixon, C., & Wenzel, D. (1989). The Hobbit: an illustrated edition of the fantasy classic. Del Rey.