Comics Adaptations

AbstrAct this article explores the question of evil and its metaphysical and moral implications in a series of animated movie adaptations of the Dc Universe produced since 2006. the contemporary evolution of the medium, called the " Iron Age of comics " , has seen the auto-reflexive nature of comics produce problems and themes related to the main question discussed in Christian theodicy: how can we perceive and define the possibility of evil in a world where God's omnipotence should have eliminated such a possibility? Moreover, why does evil seem to spread indefinitely in spite of all the efforts deployed by superheroes to stop evil? We will discuss the problem of evil as a natural narrative topic in light of comics' mythological and religious roots and with a particular study case: DC Comics Multiverse as an illustration of Leibniz's " best of all possible worlds " argument.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete):
https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Madill, A. (2011-2013) Understanding Japanese "Boys' Love" manga from a UK perspective. British Academy.

These 234 BL stories in commercial English translation constitute my sample (up to November 2013). I define a 'story' as a narrative focusing on one central uke-seme pair and sometimes that has has to be a judgement call.  All stories have been coded using a large number of content and theoretical codes. I am interested in coding patterns but the main orientation of my analysis is qualitative.""""

In den letzten Jahren hat sich die narratologische Forschung immer mehr über ihre ursprünglichen Grenzen hinaus entwickelt. Im Rahmen einer “intermedialen Narratologie” ist auch nach dem narrativen Vermögen von nicht (oder nicht rein) verbalen Medien zu fragen. Zur Filmerzählung liegen bereits einige umfassende Untersuchungen vor; eine “Baustelle” stellt noch immer das hybride Medium Comic dar. In diesem Aufsatz werden im Besonderen Comics untersucht, denen ein literarischer Prätext zugrunde liegt. Sofern es sich um eine ernstgemeinte Adaption bzw. Transformation handelt, wird nicht nur der “Stoff” (die story oder histoire der literarischen Erzählung) einem Medienwechsel unterzogen, sondern auch die Diskursebene, die Art und Weise der Erzählung. Für den Comic allgemein wie auch für den Literaturcomic ist die Frage nach der Erzählperspektive zentral, die zunächst für die visuelle und die verbale Ebene getrennt gestellt werden muss. Gerade für die visuelle Ebene scheint sich Genettes visuelle Metapher der “Fokalisierung” zu eignen. Anhand zweier Comic-Adaptionen zu Texten Franz Kafkas wird gezeigt, wie die Comicerzählung perspektiviert wird, um im Anschluss zu untersuchen, inwiefern Genettes Fokalisierungskategorien auf diese Phänomene anwendbar sind. Wenn das Fokalisierungskonzept, wie im vorliegenden Aufsatz, auf die Ebene der visuellen Perspektivierung im Comic übertragen wird, sind jedoch nicht nur Innen- und Außensicht zu unterscheiden, sondern alle drei Typen der Fokalisierung in Betracht zu ziehen.

A special issue of Literature/Film Quarterly dedicated to a range of questions raised by Damon Lindelof's 2019 HBO television 'remix' adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. The issue features essay contributions from Joshua Wille, Eduardo Navas, Aaron Taylor, Andrew Hoberek, and Sheila J. Nayar.

Available open access at:
https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/49_4/watchmen_from_comix_to_remix.html

Published in Proceedings of the 2020 Science Fictions Popular Cultures Academic Conference, edited by Timothy F. Slater, Carrie J. Cole, and Greg Littman, Pono Publishing, 2020, pp. 165-73. ISBN  979-8689344874 (paperback); eBook ASIN B08NT97MFD.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference will explore the mobility of comics and graphic novels along three axes: time, space, and media. Mobility is understood to include all processes of transformation undergone by comics in their journey across history (time), cultural and linguistic boundaries (space), and different forms of artistic expression (media). These three axes of comics' mobility are often interconnected but have so far mostly been explored in isolation and from the perspective of a single discipline or language. The opportunities and challenges of comics' translation into different languages, and their adaptation especially from/into narrative prose and film, have received increasing attention in recent years. Comics' travel through time has not been explored with the same frequency and analytical depth. Here, aspects such as the different textual and paratextual environments in anthologies and re-editions, changes to the artwork, and practices of re-drawing deserve closer attention. We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers that explore any of the dimensions of comics' mobility outlined above. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words long (excluding references).

This article is devoted to comic books which adapt the episodes from the novels of Stefan Żeromski. The comic books discussed in this work were selected in two contests organized in Polish schools. It has to be emphasized that the authors of these works are students, hence these are amateur comic strips. The author of this article presents the capability of the comic strips to serve as the adaptation of literature. The iconic layer and the means by which the authors use the poetics of the comic strips to depict the novel is presented. The choice of authors is an extremely important element as well as the choice of episodes, and whether these episodes are representative of an entire novel. Regardless of the evaluation of these works, it is vital to highlight that the comic strips promote literature (and comic books). Moreover, since the adaptation from one medium to the other requires the understanding and appreciation of the novel, the works undoubtedly possess an educational character.

Episodically constructed novel describing the adventures (or – ironically speaking – ordeals) of not-so-fervent Czech soldier Josef Švejk in Kaiser’s army during the First World War was an influential and widely translated story all around the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was quickly approached by other media: film, theatre and comics etc. During the nine decades since its original publication, Jaroslav Hašek’s famous humour novel The Good Soldier Švejk has been subject of several comics adaptations and appropriations: among them Czech (1923–1925, 2011), Serbian (1940), Polish (1956), and Hungarian (1971), to list just the most relevant ones.
Comparative interpretative approach of the proposed paper should allow us to analyze: 1) how the shared (even though sometimes contradictory) preconceptions of the declining Austro-Hungarian Empire are reflected in these comics stories, or how they differ, 2) how the “essence of the text” is being determined and creatively approached during the adaptation process, and 3) how the influence of pictorial transpositions and other media adaptations (especially Josef Lada’s illustrations and popular film versions of 1956 and 1957) significantly changed the selection of presented episodes in the latter comics adaptations and formed a typological basis for character and settings visualizations.
In Central or Eastern European context, comics were always on the brink of the institutional restriction: to adapt a national (or “befriended-country’s”) canonical literary text was quite a common way of avoiding or at least lessening these dangers of ideologically motivated condemnation. To compare several adaptations of Hašek’s novel can therefore allow us to formulate some preliminary propositions about the position of adaptation practice in the development of Central European comics discourses of the 20th century.