A Salamander and Seahorse in Sepia Tone

Transcription

1 A Salamander and Seahorse in Sepia Tone The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Adapted by Nicki Greenberg. Crows Nest, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, pages DANIEL WORDEN Nicki Greenberg s graphic adaptation of The Great Gatsby is one of many recent comics that take the work of adaptation seriously. Historically, comics adaptations of classic literature, most famously in the long-running Classics Illustrated series, were an attempt to redeem the comics medium, which was beset throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century with obscenity charges, most notably in Fredric Wertham s 1954 The Seduction of the Innocent. These adaptations of classic literature used images merely as a fun appendage to the educational text. Today, however, comics are recognized as a legitimate art form, and claims from the 1950s about the medium s juvenile, obscene, or deleterious qualities seem outdated at best. Museum exhibitions such as The Masters of American Comics, organized by UCLA s Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005, and comics anthologies such as Ivan Brunetti s two-volume Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories (2006, 2008) have presented comics as an artistic medium with its own unique aesthetic and history. Moreover, recent edited collections such as Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester s A Comics Studies Reader (2009) and Stephen E. Tabachnick s Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009), in the MLA Options for Teaching series, have concretized the emergent field of comics studies in academic discourse. Since the comics medium is historically bound to popular culture, adaptations are common tasks for comics creators. There are comics versions of nearly every major motion picture or television show, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Die Hard to Fraggle Rock and The Simpsons. Adaptations of literary works are also a constant fixture in comics culture; recent works include Nancy Butler s adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (2009) and Sense and Sensibility (2010), Eric Shanower and Skottie Young s adaptations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (2009) and The Marvelous Land of Oz (2009), and Tony Parker s adaptation of Philip K. Dick s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? c 2010 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. T HE F. SCOTT F ITZGERALD R EVIEW,VOL. 8,

2 (2009). Greenberg s The Great Gatsby, though, is more experimental in form than many comics adaptations, and it fits into a group of recent texts that foreground the comics medium s specificity. Other examples of this type of adaptation are R. Sikoryak s Masterpiece Comics (2009), which revises classic works of literature such as Macbeth and The Scarlet Letter by drawing them in the style of classic comics such as Little Lulu and Tales from the Crypt, or Darwyn Cooke s Richard Stark s Parker: The Hunter (2009), an adaptation of the classic crime novel that foregrounds the comics medium s ability to convey atmospheric emotions and play with cartoonish and realistic modes of representation. Similarly, in The Great Gatsby, Greenberg does much more than just tell us a familiar story with illustrations; she reimagines and revises Fitzgerald s novel by making it both more whimsical and more viscerally emotional. Nicki Greenberg is an Australian comics artist and author of children s books, and she has published work in a number of Australian comics anthologies. She has an interest in adaptation that precedes the publication of The Great Gatsby. Her website ( contains previously published comics adaptations of Andrew Marvell s To His Coy Mistress, revised into a narrative about a man eating an egg, and Herman Melville s Moby Dick, reimagined into a story about a man s anxiety while taking a bath. Both of these earlier works exhibit a playfulness that is also evident in The Great Gatsby. The most notable revision of Fitzgerald s novel that Greenberg undertakes is to turn all of the text s characters into animals. Nick Carraway is a cute salamander-like creature with two antennae, Jay Gatsby is an elegant, sparkling seahorse, Daisy Buchanan is a creature with a dandelion-like puff for a head, Tom Buchanan is a large gargoyle, and Jordan Baker is a luxurious, lounging squid with long eyelashes (fig. 1). Greenberg explains her decision to use these figures: Why not humans? To me, Fitzgerald s characters are so incisively rendered, their personalities, movements and voices so immediate and true, that an ordinary human representation does not capture the essence of the written characters...my aim was to make their physical attributes embody and illuminate their personalities, that series of successful gestures so sharply drawn by Fitzgerald ( Greenberg s choice to use animals and other, imaginary creatures as characters lends the text an impressionistic quality, one that seems, to this reader at least, to fit with the novel s own allegorical qualities. The characters in The Great Gatsby stand in for larger ideas and social roles, and this violation of literary realism s emphasis on rounded characters is rendered overt by Greenberg s use of non-human characters. Gatsby appears to be resplendent as a seahorse, Nick s role as a chronicler 232 T HE F. SCOTT F ITZGERALD R EVIEW,VOL. 8, 2010

3 and witness is embodied by his antennae, and Daisy s sense of aimlessness is made evident through her gangly, delicate appearance. Fig. 1 While Greenberg s use of non-human characters does foreground the impressionistic and perhaps anti-realist qualities in Fitzgerald s novel, it also gestures to the history of the comics medium. The use of animals and other, imaginary creatures is quite common in comics, and these figures are often anthropomorphized. One of the early masters of the comics form was George Herriman, who wrote and illustrated the Krazy Kay comic strip (Herriman s T HE F. SCOTT F ITZGERALD R EVIEW,VOL. 8,

4 Krazy Kat is available in a number of collected editions, the most accessible being the Krazy & Ignatz series published by Fantagraphics Books). Krazy Kat appeared in newspapers from 1913 to 1944 and was well regarded by modernist writers such as e. e. cummings and Robert Warshow, both of whom wrote essays about the strip. One of the models for subsequent animal comics, Krazy Kat features two central characters, a cat, Krazy, and a mouse, Ignatz, and the mouse, in nearly every strip, throws a brick at the cat s head. Herriman s strip is simple in its narrative structure, but within that repetition he builds in myriad complexities and emotions. Sometimes, Krazy seems to desire Ignatz s brick. Other times, Ignatz seems to question his addiction to brick-throwing and expresses a desire for rehabilitation. The complexity of this seemingly simple gag strip is one of the examples of the emotionally charged role that animals play in comics. Other examples include Snoopy in Charles Shultz s Peanuts, DonRosa sthe Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, and even contemporary works such as Jeff Smith s Bone and Andy Runton s Owly and Friends. In late twentieth-century comics, the use of animals as people is most famously employed in Art Spiegelman s Maus (1986, 1991), in which Spiegelman relays his father s experience during the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Unlike Spiegelman s use of animal types, Greenberg s focus is much more on individuality than socially imposed categories, less of a way of critiquing ethnic and national identities than a way of emphasizing the unique qualities of Fitzgerald s characters. Greenberg s seahorses, salamanders, squids, and gargoyles represent human emotions and identities in a heightened state, rendering what is typically thought of as internal, external. The other formal device that Greenberg uses to adapt The Great Gatsby is page layout. Traditionally, the comics page is divided up into panels, which are separated by a white space, called a gutter. By placing panels in order, comics artists create a sense of narrative movement, and it is the reader s role to interpret the relationship between one panel and the next, that is, to read the gutter as the passage of time or as the transition from one space to another. Greenberg plays with this structure by drawing The Great Gatsby as a photo album. Instead of conventional panels on a white page, The Great Gatsby uses black pages and sepia-toned images, and the panels have crenulated edges. The title page bears an illustration of a Polaroid Land Camera with a cracked lens, and the first chapter begins with drawings of Nick Carraway at a desk, surrounded by photos, glue, and a photo album that looks much like the book in the reader s own hands (fig. 2). As with the use of non-human characters, this formal device does relate to Fitzgerald s novel. The Great Gatsby is, of course, about modernity and technology, so the focus on photography, and especially the family photo album, seems of a piece with the novel s own focus 234 T HE F. SCOTT F ITZGERALD R EVIEW,VOL. 8, 2010

5 on early twentieth-century technologies like the automobile. Furthermore, when one thinks of The Great Gatsby, one often thinks of visual images, especially the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. By turning Nick s retrospective narration into an assemblage of photographs, Greenberg links her adaptation s visual storytelling to the emergence of twentieth-century technologies as well as the novel s own imagery. Fig. 2 The photo-album structure constantly reminds the reader that Nick is the narrator, and the sepia-toned photographs and sad-eyed creatures lend the T HE F. SCOTT F ITZGERALD R EVIEW,VOL. 8,

6 text an overall nostalgic and melancholic tone. Greenberg also plays with panel layout, making the panels crooked when Nick is drunk at one of Gatsby s lavish parties to convey the topsy-turvy haze through which he experiences events. As a substitute for a more conventional panel structure, though, the photo- album structure does not make a great deal of logical sense since what the reader reads is not a photo album but a series of drawn images with all of the conventional devices of the comics panel, including text blocks for narration and word balloons for dialogue. Greenberg, then, only partially breaks with conventional comics form by using the photo-album design, while retaining the textual devices of the comics panel. This makes The Great Gatsby feel a bit uneven, especially since photographs typically lack text blocks or word balloons. The adaptation is at its best, though, when it includes other documents along with illustrated panels, such as newspaper clippings, letters, and a page from Nick s schedule. The inclusion of these drawn documents gives the text a heightened realism, providing a contrast with the otherwise fanciful use of creatures as characters. Other key moments involve play with images. Throughout The Great Gatsby, images blur into characters. Daisy s face becomes the moon, musical notes become a slide that Nick can ride on during Gatsby s lavish party, and Dr. Eckleburg s eyes appear in silent panels to mark Nick s realization of Tom s affair with Myrtle. The conclusion of the text contains an elegant example of this imagistic play with a panel that superimposes Gatsby s seahorse face on the green light at the end of Daisy s dock, followed by a silent panel depicting the moon, with Gatsby s image coiled around it (304). The bottom two panels on the page bring the reader back into the diegetic space of the narrative with images of Nick walking into the ocean, looking and gesturing towards the moon, reaching for a belief in the orgiastic future that Gatsby embodied (fig. 3). These moments convey a sense of melancholic loss, even if they do flatten out the meaning of the text by denying other readings that might emphasize a more critical or cynical tone. Nicki Greenberg s The Great Gatsby molds Fitzgerald s novel into a narrative about loss and longing. The use of non-human characters is a bit jarring given the historical specificity of the rest of the text, with its close attention to technological detail in the photo-album structure and the use of written texts and newspaper clippings alongside illustrated panels. The one thing that does seem missing from the emotional palette of this text is Fitzgerald s singular wit. The emphasis on identifying emotionally with the characters undoes the distance that the reader might need to grasp the significance of Tom s dinner table conversation about eugenics or even Gatsby s own imaginative stories about his past. Greenberg s The Great Gatsby succeeds at adapting the novel s imagery into 236 T HE F. SCOTT F ITZGERALD R EVIEW,VOL. 8, 2010

7 the comics medium and exhibiting how that medium can convey emotional complexity. Fig. 3 T HE F. SCOTT F ITZGERALD R EVIEW,VOL. 8,