European Comic Art

This edition of European Comic Art (ECA) is devoted to comics adaptations of literary works. It thereby makes a contribution to adaptation studies, a field that has rapidly expanded in tune with the postmodern awareness that we can no longer securely assign texts to individual authors as genesis and sole creative origin, even if the phenomenon of adaptation itself is not new. Gérard Genette points out that ‘l’humanité, qui découvre sans cesse du sens, ne peut toujours inventer de nouvelles formes’ [humanity, which keeps discovering new meanings, cannot always invent new forms].

Since the millennium, bande dessinée artists have retold Voltaire's Candide three times. The first Candide is by Joann Sfar, the second by Philippe Meyran, and the third, by Gorian Delpâture, Michel Dufranne and Vujadin Radovanovic, is being published by Delcourt. This article begins with a brief presentation of the work. Taking our three Candides in chronological order, I then examine how Sfar, Meyran and the Delcourt version retell the story. Specific excerpts are studied, with emphasis on how far they convey Voltaire's irony. We shall see how Sfar finds new ways to infuse Candide with irony. Analogies with medieval illuminations intimate that the great iconoclast is being sanctified. Moreover, Sfar's grotesque artwork contrasts with Voltaire's elegant prose. Thus, Sfar adds a visual dimension to Voltaire's incongruities between what is said and what is meant. Sfar also jokes about ideas raised by Voltaire including philosophical optimism, anti-Semitism and Utopianism. Meyran depicts the hero's sequence of misfortunes with faux naïf caricature. Thus, he makes visible an incongruity between narrative developments and the manner of their recounting. Yet Meyran usually weakens (or eliminates) irony, while playing down philosophical and polemical issues. The Delcourt version employs elegant, technically accomplished artwork. The narrative is not without irony although engagement is intermittent. This work places emphasis on recounting a fast-moving adventure rather than elaborating upon the story's philosophical underpinnings.

Anyango and Mairowitz's graphic adaptation Heart of Darkness, published in 2010, interweaves parts of the original Conradian novella Heart of Darkness with several entries from Conrad's Congo Diary (1890), a series of stark factual notations he wrote down when visiting Congo in 1890. While this adaptation insists on a spatialization and historicization of the original text, the heterogeneous obscure graphic style as well as the intermediality created by the tension image-text-diary exposes the alterity and ambivalence within Conrad himself. This essay examines how the graphic narrative allows diary and fiction to act in dialogue with image, complicating Conrad's critique of Belgian colonialism and his implied indictment of British colonial expansion.

In 1940, Adolfo Bioy Casares published La Invención de Morel [The Invention of Morel], a novel that can be considered as one of the most important works of twentieth-century Argentinian fantastic narrative. Since the novel portrays competition between different media, it is not surprising that this work has been adapted to several other media: visual arts, plays, opera, and several feature films, the first and still the best known being L'Année dernière à Marienbad [Last year in Marienbad] (1961). The latest incarnation of La Invención de Morel is the first comic version, created by Jean Pierre Mourey (2007). This article discusses Mourey's adaptation of the novel and the specific possibilities of the comic genre. Special attention will be paid to the conception of time, the manipulation of various media, and the competition between the written word and images which are at the heart of Bioy's novel, and the extent to which the French cartoonist's rendering of these aspects of the work is successful.

Raymond Queneau's 1959 novel Zazie dans le métro has been adapted into two text/image versions, by Jacques Carelman in 1966 and by Clément Oubrerie in 2008. Carelman's version is strongly inscribed in the fidelity discourse, while Oubrerie advocates a process of complete appropriation of the source text by the adapter. This article will explore how the three interrelated aspects of approach to adaptation, text/image combination and readership and reader's experience, shape the transposition of the source text into two strikingly different text/image versions by Carelman and Oubrerie. Focusing on the transposition of the literary voices of the source text, it will discuss the differing manners in which the adapters use the specificity of their chosen medium to make the characters of Zazie dans le métro speak in text and image to their new readers.

As part of the Potsdam Agreement following World War II, 2.8 million Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia. Disturbing details of mass executions and forced marches of Germans have become the topic of public debate in the Czech Republic. In recent years, representations of this traumatic episode in Czech history have filtered into popular culture as well. This article considers how the graphic novels Alois Nebel and Bomber, whose authors were inspired by Art Spiegelman's Maus, address the controversial issue of the German expulsion.

The German journal London und Paris called James Gillray 'the foremost living artist in his genre, not only amongst Englishmen, but amongst all European nations'. Despite the scholarly attention he has attracted, many of Gillray's individual works have yet to receive rigorous analysis. One such neglected print is National Conveniences (1796), assumed to be a crude, straightforward expression of national supremacy. However, a closer reading shows Gillray employing the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau both to undermine notions of English superiority and to assail a particular personal adversary. With this reading in mind, we can reassess references to Rousseau in Gillray's other prints, and propose a new direction from which to approach his greater oeuvre.

Benoît Peeters, Hergé: Son of Tintin, trans. Tina A. Kover (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) [J. Gavin Paul]

Monika Schmitz-Emans (with Christian A. Bachmann), Literatur-Comics: Adaptationen und Transformationen der Weltliteratur (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2012) [Silke Horstkotte]

Bertrand Richet (ed.), Le Tour du monde d?Astérix (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011) [Catherine Khordoc]

Hans-Joachim Backe, Under the Hood: Die Verweisstruktur der Watchmen (Bochum: Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag, 2010) [Gabriele Rippl]

Notes on contributors