scholarly journals To Kill a Mockingbird: Why would it be a sin to shoot down its Graphic Novel adaptation?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Augusta Albuja Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Innovative Approach ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Bande Dessinee ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird

In 2018, Harper Lee’s (1926-2016) Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) was adapted to a graphic novel by the English artist Fred Fordham. Heir to the Franco-Belgian bande-dessinée tradition, the artist shows panels filled with delicate and pastel-colored illustrations that move at a proper pace, focusing on the younger characters’ perspective. The artist keeps important dialogues from Lee’s novel, while also offering his view. Any revision of a classic represents a challenge, especially because of the possible comparisons to the original. At the same time, an adaptation can bring new light and freshness to stories that deserve to be revisited. Far from intending to compare the graphic novel with the original, this analysis aims to comment on some essential matters concerning the new version. What are the unique formal –visual and written– aspects that the graphic novel provides? What are the new experiences it offers to the reader? What is the artist’s innovative approach and input? Why it is important to bring this story back during these times of reemergence of nationalist governments, xenophobic and antifeminist movements and policies? In a few words, what is the merit of this adaptation in this millennium?

Bande dessinée

2020 ◽  
pp. 403-410
Author(s):  
Mark McKinney
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novel ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Bande Dessinee

Some contemporary French cartoonists have published comics that either themselves serve as post-colonial lieux de mémoire in place of disappeared colonial people, places, events or objects, or that otherwise recall colonial lieux de mémoire. The graphic novel Cannibale (2009), adapted by Emmanuel Reuzé from Didier Daeninckx's eponymous prose novel (1998), returns to the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, which has become a post-colonial lieu de mémoire. The 1931 event, staged at the zenith of French imperial rule, and overseen by Maréchal Lyautey, was grandiose in conception, size and scope, and racist too, in fact. Both versions of Cannibale feature a Kanak narrator sent to perform as a New Caledonian cannibal in the Parisian exhibition. This essay analyzes how Reuzé uses cartooning techniques such as visual symbolism, subjective viewpoints, visual and verbal narration, inset images, and visual rhymes to critique French colonialism and to commemorate its victims.

“Well, Heck”: Confounding Grace in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 656-674
Author(s):  
Trevor Cook
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
The Law ◽  
The American South

Lawyers love to write about To Kill a Mockingbird, which they believe to have been written by one of their own, but as the recent publication of an early draft of Harper Lee’s best-selling novel reveals, there is more to her Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the American South than an exhilarating trial scene and an exemplary lawyer. This article attends to the importance of grace in the development of Lee’s artistic vision through a close reading of the novel’s morally compromised conclusion, where an incarnational ethic of love ultimately (though perhaps imperfectly) fulfills the purpose of the law.

Stripping H.C. Andersen. Peter Madsen’s Historien om en mor (or, what a graphic novel adaptation can do that its literary source cannot)

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-318
Author(s):  
Camilla Storskog
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Page Layout ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
Bande Dessinee ◽  
The Media ◽  
Depth And Complexity ◽  
Work Done

Abstract This article addresses the transposition of H.C. Andersen’s literary production to comics and graphic novels; a vast, though little explored, field of research. It furnishes a brief overview of the work done by comic art creators in approaching the adaptation of Andersen, and proceeds to analyse Historien om en mor, Peter Madsen’s 2004 graphic novel adaptation of Andersen’s Historien om en Moder from 1848. As Madsen’s version is predominantly visual, employing images and sequences rather than words in the re-telling of the fairy tale, the investigation is presented as a semiotic analysis drawing on the tools provided by Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007; ed. orig. Système de la bande dessinée, 1999). Categories scrutinised as meaning makers include gridding, braiding, page layout, and the handling of the dimension of time, with the ultimate aim of describing how the media affordances of comics, in the hands of a true craftsman, add depth and complexity to the re-narration of Andersen’s original.

Cultural and Linguistic Interferences in the Translation of Maus Into Spanish

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-82
Author(s):  
Cristina A. Huertas Abril
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Cultural Paradigm ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Previous Idea

Comics are a type of literature with an increasing prestige due to the change in the cultural paradigm, which has surpassed the previous idea of underground means of expression. This cultural change took place with the publication of Spiegelman's Maus (Pulitzer Prize 1992). This chapter aims at analyzing the evolution of key terms in Translation Studies regarding cultural issues, from ‘equivalence' to ‘transcreation', and reflecting on the importance given to graphic novels since Spiegelman's work. The author analyzes the two Spanish translations published till the date, which have remarkable differences between them, in order to reach homogeneous proposals to reflect linguistic and cultural interferences when translating this graphic novel into Spanish, essential for the adequate understanding of Maus.

scholarly journals Book Reviews

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-115
Author(s):  
David Miranda-Barreiro ◽  
Michelle Herte ◽  
Joe Sutliff Sanders ◽  
Mark McKinney
Keyword(s):  
Media Culture ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Bande Dessinee ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Lincoln University

Santiago García (trans. Bruce Campbell), On the Graphic Novel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). 375 pp. ISBN: 978-1-49681-318-3 ($30)Jan-Noël Thon, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture, Frontiers of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). 527 pp. ISBN: 978-0-80-327720-5 (€50.99)Thierry Bellefroid, ed., L’Âge d’Or de la bande dessinée belge: La Collection du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Liège (Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2015). 96 pp. ISBN: 978-2-87-449232-7 (€19.50)Philippe Delisle, Petite histoire politique de la BD belge de langue française: Années 1920–1960 (Paris: Karthala, 2016). 199 pp. ISBN: 978-2-81- 111717-7 (€15)

The Graphic Novel

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Baetens ◽  
Hugo Frey
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novel
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