Any adaptation of an original work is subject to the perspective of the adaptor. Subconscious or intentional, subtle or blatant, the choices made by the artist paint intangible layers of subjectivity over its source, changing it to best fit their own personal understandings. This phenomenon is perhaps most apparent in the adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Because of a combination of the play’s susceptibility as a medium for directorial adjustments, the ambiguities inherent in the plots and the characters, and the bard’s almost fanatical global reputation, Shakespeare’s texts have been modified, reworked, and reimagined in every era since their creation.
One of the most recent mediums to take hold of Shakespeare’s work is the graphic novel. Nancy Pedri, in an essay comparing the art of photography with graphic novels, states that “the cartoon image does not hide, or attempt to hide, the hand of its maker as the photographic image does” (7). What Pedri is touching upon here is the blatant subjectivity of the drawn medium. Comics not only invite outside perspectives through the potential modification of both the text and the image they create, but adaptations that utilize the graphic novel medium are overtly derivative; they wear their status as an adaptation on their sleeve. “…since cartoons are so obviously handmade…they allude to their own making” (Pedri 7). While some may dismiss comics as childish due to their lack of subtlety, the graphic novel, especially in contemporary times with authors like Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, has proved itself to be more than capable in the presentation of complicated moral and philosophical issues. The graphic novel’s rejection of objectivity is not a weakness, but a strength. Because adaptations within this modern medium tend to showcase their authorial biases, this forces the adaptor to spotlight their personal understandings of the original work rather than bury it within the plot. To best exemplify the vast diversity in the methods and abilities of the graphic novel medium, this essay uses the comics theories presented by Scott McCloud in his book, Understanding Comics, to analyze three different graphic adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The choice of King Lear presents a fixed background upon which the effects of the comic medium can be highlighted, and the investigation of the three interpretations by Gareth Hinds, Ian Pollock, and Richard Appignanesi will not only demonstrate the depth and ambiguity in Shakespeare’s play, but also the capability of the graphic novel to encompass these alternative perspectives while staying anchored to the original text.
Perhaps the most essential component of the graphic novel that separates it from other mediums is its reliance on closure. McCloud defines closure as the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). At a purely physical level, the graphic novel is made up of panels, individual images that are usually completely separated from each other by the empty space present between each square. This blank space is commonly referred to as the “gutter”, and it is in this space where comics transform from a stagnant series of still images into a collection of moving frames within an animated scene. Gareth Hinds’ adaptation of King Lear takes advantage of this graphic strategy in his focus on the fighting scenes throughout the play. While Pollock and Appignanesi tend to contain the scenes of physical battle within one or two panels, Hinds gives each fight several pages to develop.
Notice how, in this scene where Cornwall’s servant draws upon his master after witnessing the horrible blinding of Gloucester, the panels do not read as still images, but instead create a sense of motion and movement. This is due to the presence of the gutter between the panels. The gutter triggers the human imagination to “[take] two separate images and transform them into a single idea” (McCloud 66). Furthermore, the reader is not only responsible for imagining the happenings between the panels, but it is also up to the audience to interpret the passage of time in the gutter, how long it takes to get from one panel to the other. While other art mediums like film may exercise complete control over a narrative’s temporality, graphic novels relinquish that control to the reader, marking comics as a medium where “the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion” (McCloud 65). The importance of this temporal flexibility is exemplified in the details Hinds draws into the facial expressions of both the duke and his servant during the fight. At the bottom of the page, the middle panel shows Cornwall’s surprise as the servant lands a fatal blow upon the duke. Because of the graphic novel’s reliance on closure to present its narrative, the events of this panel occur both in an instant and an eternity. It is because of the reader’s ability to, in a sense, “pause” the graphic novel at will to study the details of the panel, Hinds is able to portray the duke’s shocked and terrified reaction at his wound, highlighting his reading of the character as fatally arrogant, without compromising the timing of the fight. To further support this point, at the top-right of the page is a full shot of the servant’s determined, but emotionally conflicted, expression. With his mouth open in an unheard scream and his eyes shut tight to his actions, Hinds emphasizes the inner turmoil within the servant’s mind caused by his mutinous actions, underscored earlier by the play’s original lines, “I have served you ever since I was a child” (Shakespeare 3.7.71). Hinds is able to maintain the rapid pace and tone of the battle without having to worry about the reader missing the intricacies in his images that subtly layout the emotional landscape of the fight because of the phenomenon of the gutter and closure. Only with the temporal fluidity of the graphic novel could Hinds have wordlessly preserved his presentation of the complex emotions within the characters during a tense, frantic scene of deadly egotism and the anguished upholding of justice.
The placement of the gutter is an especially important concept to keep in mind specifically when analyzing Hinds’ adaptation of the play because of the ways he twists and reworks the effects of closure, taking advantage of the gutter’s relation to time. Perhaps the best example of this is in his interpretation of the scene where Goneril and Regan reduce the number of Lear’s knights, the moment in which they drain the very last morsel of power from the former king.
Aside from shaping the panels like fractured glass to mirror the shattering of Lear’s world view and the destruction of his sense of self, the absence of the gutter in these pages dresses the scene in a layer of timelessness. Without spaces between the pictures, the panels meld together into one large visual rendition of Lear’s rage and panic. The lack of closure both halts the movement of time and leads the reader to focus on Lear’s emotions in this scene rather than his words, as can be seen in the bottom-left corner where the action of Lear anxiously grasping at his hair literally pushes aside the original lines from Shakespeare’s play. By doing this, Hinds is attempting to interpose Lear’s perspective upon the reader’s. The framing of Hinds’ panels usually places the audience in a detached position; the reader does not see the events of the play from the personal viewpoint of a character. However, in these two pages, the lack of the gutter and the visual integration of each panel with each other can be read as a form of indirect discourse. The reader is suddenly seeing the scene from Lear’s terror-stricken perspective. Also to be noted in Hinds’ pages is his omission of Goneril and Regan’s lines of compromise. Present in the original play are statements of accommodation from Lear’s daughters, with Goneril suggesting “Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance/From those that she calls servants or from mine?” (Shakespeare 2.2.432–433) and Regan agreeing that “If then they chanced to slack ye/We could control them” (2.2.434–435). These lines soften the blow of the daughters’ commandeering of power, highlighting the rarely seen sympathetic side of their personalities. However, Hinds chooses to hide these statements in his presentation of this scene, thus reinforcing the reading that these two pages are from Lear’s perspective as, in Shakespeare’s text, the fallen king immediately ignores these pleas and follows Regan’s words with “I gave you all — ” (2.2.438). At this point Lear perceives Goneril and Regan as completely cold-hearted and unfeeling, and one of the ways Hinds shifts the perspective of the comic to Lear is through the omission of these lines. In these two pages, Hinds not only projects his argument that this is the scene in which Lear’s impressions of his role as a king and a father are completely obliterated, but pushes the reader to see Lear’s fall through the king’s own eyes. His choice to remove the gutter overshadows the objective viewpoint of the play’s original lines with a feeling of perpetuity, spotlighting his personal interpretation of the former king’s feelings of betrayal and mental agony.
However, if we were to only consider Hinds’ work in this discussion of closure, our perspective would be entirely limited to the western style of comic drawing. Manga, the Japanese term for their eastern form of comics and graphic novels, has several similarities to its western counterpart, but the two styles of graphic narratives differ greatly in the way they use the gutter to incite closure. McCloud separates panel transitions into six distinct categories and, while action-to-action transitions (think of Hinds’ action scenes) usually dominate both the western and eastern graphic landscape, manga and other eastern comic styles tend to diversify more in their storytelling by using a higher ratio of non-action transitions like moment-to-moment, subject-to-subject, and aspect-to-aspect transitions (McCloud 78–79). Though Appignanesi’s adaptation of King Lear is illustrated by a British artist, Ed Hillyer, his graphic novel copies the style of a Japanese manga, even so much as to advertise their series of comics as “Manga Shakespeare” (Appignanesi Cover). While Appignanesi reworks the text to make it a little more colloquial and accessible to a younger audience, the majority of changes he makes to the play are not shown textually, but visually. One of the key interpretations he presents in his novel is the reimagination of Lear’s fool as Cordelia in disguise.
Appignanesi chooses to present this modification through a silent subject-to-subject transition. At the top of the page, the panels of revelation consist of a zoom in on disguised Kent’s incredulous reaction and the fool’s shoes, which the reader recognizes as bearing the same floral pattern as Cordelia’s shoes earlier in the novel. “Note the degree of reader involvement necessary to render [subject-to-subject] transitions meaningful” (McCloud 71). What is interesting about choosing to display his interpretation using this specific type of panel transition is how much Appignanesi is relying on the reader to make the connection of what Kent’s facial expression has to do with the fool’s footwear. The effect of juxtaposing these peculiar panels is that, because the audience has to self-interpret the happenings in this moment, the reader mirrors Kent, both parties sharing in this instance of realization. Not only does this amplify the importance of Appignanesi’s character substitution to the audience, but the Cordelia/Fool character is made even more tragic through the continued uses of this subject-to-subject transition. When Appignanesi inserts Lear’s original lines of “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! I/would not be mad” (Shakespeare 1.5.43–44) on page 80 of his adaptation, there is a transition to a panel, devoid of speech bubbles, in which the reader sees tears streaming down the fool’s face. Cordelia’s witnessing of her father’s descent into madness is heart-breaking, and, in a reflection of the fool’s choice to remain silent about her true identity, the subject-to-subject transitions to her reactions are also completely absent of dialogue. Because the reader is given only the play’s lines and an image of the fool’s tears, the moment of closure where the audience has to figure out themselves the cause of Cordelia’s misery forces them to empathize with Cordelia, deepening the tragic events of the play through an unspoken soliloquy.
Aside from subject-to-subject transitions, Appignanesi’s manga utilizes many aspect-to-aspect transitions as well, a type of panel juxtaposition that is rarely seen in western comics.
Most often used to establish a mood or a sense of place, time seems to stand still in these quiet, contemplative combinations. Even sequence, while still an issue, seems far less important here than in other transitions. Rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments, the reader here must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments. (McCloud 79)
McCloud’s analysis of the author’s intentions in using this type of panel transition is exemplified in Appignanesi’s interpretation of Edmund’s first soliloquy.
In this scene, the author is using the gutter and closure to build an emotion, a feeling of serenity and reverence. From the close up of the sparkling waters at the top of the page to the leaves blowing in the wind at the bottom, the entire scene is composed of the still fragments of a timeless moment, focusing the reader’s attention to the natural world around the character. The reason for Appignanesi deciding to emphasize the landscape in this speech is a part of the nature theme that he threads throughout his adaptation. His novel reimagines Lear as a Native American chief living during the times of colonization, and all throughout the work there are subtle references to the battle between the natural traditions of the Native Americans and the industrialist, anti-environmental acts of the colonists. It is inferred that Edmund, as a bastard, is a mix of Gloucester’s English blood and that of an unknown Native woman. The aspect-to-aspect transition at the beginning of his speech is used to perpetuate a feeling of tranquility and oneness with nature, which presents Edmund as aligned with Native American ideologies. However, Appignanesi constructs the scene such that, by the end of the soliloquy when Edmund shouts “…now, gods, stand up for bastards!” (Appignanesi 44) the words are contained within a spiked speech bubble and directed towards dark storm clouds that disfigure the previously serene depiction of the landscape. From this inversion of mood and tone, Appignanesi is suggesting that, in his last line, Edmund is rejecting his Native American reverence for nature and allying himself with the anti-environmental European colonists. This conversion is further underscored by his European style of dress and his donning of a tricorne on page 48. Appignanesi’s adaptation melds the conflicts in the original play with the Native Americans’ fight against colonization and its imperialist practices, and he does this partly by using the Japanese manga’s penchant for aspect-to-aspect transitions to create pastoral displays of the landscape.
The graphic novel medium gives interpreters another tool in the ability to modify the colors and forms of characters and settings to impossible proportions, even so far as to visualize typically invisible entities like sounds and feelings. Because a necessity of the graphic novel is the interplay between the text and a visual entity, artists and authors (usually synonymous but not always) must work to create a graphic aspect that matches their understanding of the text. Out of the three graphic adaptations of King Lear, none highlights the visual element of the comic more than the interpretation by Ian Pollock. Pollock’s novel is the most text-heavy of the three; he includes almost every line as well as some of the stage directions. Yet, it speaks to the power of his absurd, surrealist drawing style that, despite the abundance of text, the words do not distract from his bizarre cartooning.
Beginning with his illustration of the court scene, the sharp white boxes of text that cover most of the page exemplifies the lack of line cuts in Pollock’s adaptation. However, matching Shakespeare’s many lines with his distinctly eccentric drawing style, Pollock is able to layer upon the original story his own interpretations of the setting and characters. In the largest panel on the page, Pollock displays his imagining of Lear’s kingdom. Unlike other adaptations that put Lear in a colossal, intimidating castle, Pollock begins with Lear ruling over a mostly empty expanse, the only decorations being enormous rectangular towers propped up by wooden beams. This barren landscape implies a reading of King Lear which undercuts the tragedy of the play and, in its place, accentuates a message about the futility and meaninglessness of power. Because Lear is already ruling over nothing to begin with, when he loses his throne, which is differentiated from the other grey pillars only by the chair on the top, Lear’s political fall is undercut by the absurdity of the fact that, even in exile, he has essentially lost nothing. Jan Kott expresses a similar perspective in his essay, King Lear or Endgame.
[The cruelty of Lear] is a philosophical cruelty. Neither the romantic, nor the naturalistic theatre was able to show that sort of cruelty; only the new theatre can. In this new theatre there are no characters, and the tragic element has been superseded by grotesque. Grotesque is more cruel than tragedy.(Kott 176)
Because Lear has lost nothing in his fall, it is arguable that the play is not a tragedy, but instead, as Kott describes, a “grotesque” play. Pollock’s decision to exemplify the fruitless nature of power with the desolate landscape blames the play’s events solely on the characters’ vices and evil desires, as they are literally bringing pain and ruin for nothing. Even the king’s descent into madness is less of a loss of sanity than an amplification of his already crazy actions. At the bottom-left of the page from Pollock’s King Lear, there is a depiction of Lear dividing his kingdom by using a pair of scissors to recklessly cut a rolled up map into three pieces. The rolled map implies that the king’s lines of separation are not anchored in a foundation in logic or reasoning and, in combination with his frayed beard and lack of a definitive outline, Pollock’s interpretation of Lear starts with the king already mad, and it is the king’s own madness that leads to his downfall. “The grotesque is a criticism of the absolute in the name of frail human experience…In the world of the grotesque, downfall cannot be justified by, or blamed on, the absolute…The absolute is absurd” (Kott 177). As seen by the empty surroundings, Pollock visualizes the absolute as nothing. The horrific events of the play occur due to a struggle for power, but, if political power is nothing, then every terrible, inhumane act of betrayal, murder, and torture is made meaningless. Pollock’s depiction of Lear and his kingdom point to Kott’s definition of the grotesque and, through this reading, it can be inferred that Pollock’s graphic novel is a parallel of new theatre, where “tragic situations become grotesque” (Kott 178).
Pollock’s manipulation of the cartoon form truly shines in his surrealist interpretation of Lear’s fool. While other characters in the comic may stretch and distort their bodies to exaggerate their emotions, none do so as frequently and as extremely as the fool. Throughout the play, the fool, like a character from a slapstick cartoon for children, constantly manipulates his body to impossible proportions and seemingly summons props from thin air. However, arguably the most shocking scene with the fool is the one in which the fool gives his prophecy.
In the Shakespearean play, both Lear and Kent exit first, leaving the fool alone on stage. At this point the character directly addresses the audience and speaks his prophecy before following the others offstage. Pollock’s adaptation doesn’t just perpetuate the surreal, meta tone of this scene, but expands upon it through the manipulation of the text’s physical form. An abstract technique only existent in the graphic novel medium, Pollock positions the lines of the play within circular speech bubbles that have no arrow pointing to their speaker. While the meta aspect of the original play is captured in the fool’s direct gaze towards the reader, Pollock goes one step further in turning the fool’s juggling balls into capsules for the prophecy. McCloud argues in his book on comic theory that, while some may see the graphic novel as a combination of two separate art forms, text and images, the language of the graphic novel is actually single and unified. If cartoons are the iconic abstraction of reality, then “words are the ultimate abstraction” (47). His philosophy is that text is the ultimate icon, that words are one of the most abstract drawings of a form. If we read this scene from Pollock’s King Lear with McCloud’s theory in mind, the fool can be seen as not just juggling the words of his prophecy, but playing with the future itself. Pollock’s decision to have the fool literally holding the future in his hands suggests a mystical, almost divinely powerful interpretation of the character. This reading is supported further by the lack of arrows on the speech bubbles containing the prophecy. Usually, each box of dialogue is accompanied with a branching arrow or line pointing to the speaker to alleviate confusion on the reader’s behalf as to the origins of the words. Yet, Pollock has decided to omit the arrows from the prophecy’s speech bubbles, implying that the fool never actually speaks the prophecy out loud. This theory not only turns the fool’s line of “I’ll speak a prophecy” (Pollock 72) entirely ironic, but also presents a divination that only the reader can perceive. When presented alongside the fool’s unnerving, unblinking gaze, the words inside the juggling balls expand their interpretive bounds beyond that of the play such that the prophecy becomes one that predicts the future of the real world as well as the fictional, reinforced by the lines “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time” (Shakespeare 3.3.95). Pollock exaggerated and magnified to the extreme the meta nature of the fool’s character through the use of cartooning and the manipulation of speech bubbles such that the character transforms into a sort of demigod, possessing abilities that could only be fathomed when presented through the graphic novel medium.
This manipulation of form and visual imagery, while best seen in Pollock’s novel, is not exclusive to just his adaptation. Appignanesi’s graphic novel also takes advantage of the artist’s freedom to embody their understanding of the character within the drawn physical form of the person. Appignanesi’s artist, Ed Hillyer, most distorts the cartoon forms of Goneril and Regan to exemplify his understanding of their personalities. Previously discussed was the theme of nature and how it was present throughout this adaptation. It is no surprise then that, following this trend, Hillyer has decided to draw Goneril and Regan as extremely animal-like with Goneril mimicking a fox and Regan imitating a snake.
Aside from the fox and snake clasps on their cloaks, Hillyer has illustrated both of their physical forms to match their respective animal. Goneril’s hair is spiked and unkempt, sticking up like the ears on her fox-shaped fastener. Meanwhile, Regan’s half-bald head and lack of nose not only creates an unsettling, uncanny valley type aura around her, but makes her visage reminiscent of the head of a snake, especially with the top-right panel portraying her mouth as almost spanning the entire width of her head. Because of the reputations of the fox and snake in mythology as being naturally cunning and sly trickster figures, Hillyer’s choice to use these animals to represent the sisters both speaks to his perspective that they are inherently evil, and reinforces the reading that their demise was due to their own vices. Appignanesi presents the sisters’ deaths the same way as the original play, with Regan dying to poison and Goneril by stabbing. Because they end up killing each other, one interpretation is that their deaths were the fault of the other. However, if Hillyer’s animalistic lens is layered on top of the original text, the two deaths are made situationally ironic. Regan, the snake, dies from drinking poison, and Goneril, the fox, is killed by a dagger that looks suspiciously like a claw (Appignanesi 198). By employing the graphic novel’s ability to manipulate visual elements, Hillyer is able to construct his personal imaginings of Goneril and Regan as a fox and snake, respectively. This depiction promotes a reading suggesting that the sisters’ demise was not due to the vices of the other, but that their inherent greed and hunger for power lead them to their indirect suicide.
While Pollock’s and Hillyer’s adaptations lean heavily towards the control of form, Hinds’ graphic novel balances the changes in form with adjustments in color as well. Pollock and Hillyer keep the color palette of their adaptations fairly similar throughout their novels, with Hillyer’s monochrome King Lear consisted of black, whites and greys, and Pollock’s main color scheme being a combination of muted, pastel browns and greens. Neither work holds a candle to the variation of color in Hinds’ comic. Like a film, the novel uses its color as a visual tool to reflect elements of a scene, but, unlike a movie, the graphic novel medium allows Hinds to match color and form in ways impossible for a live-action film or theatrical production.
Compare Hinds’ presentation of the love test (fig. 8) with his depiction of Lear giving his speech in the storm after being cast out (fig. 9). An obvious change to note is that of the background and filling colors. During the love test, each entity on the page is made up of a blend of soft yellows, reds, blues, etc. and, even though the outlines of the characters are composed of many colors traced on top of one another, the shapes of the characters remain neat and defined. With the coloring of this illustration, Hinds marks the love test as a time where Lear still has a joyful, ignorant view of the world. Similar to the effect of the shattered panels showing Lear’s exile (fig. 2), the childish, comfortable visuals of the page mark the perspective of the scene as from the king’s naive point of view. However, in contrast to the pleasant colors of the love test, Lear’s color and shape in the storm scene are visually dark and panicked. The shadowy black and blue of the storm permeates Lear’s body and, in combination with Shakespeare’s original lines such as “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!” (Shakespeare 3.2.1) and “Spit fire, spout rain!” (3.2.14), the staccato rhythm of the dialogue mixed with the lightless color scheme presents both textually and visually a reading that shows the storm as an internal and external force. Supporting this reading is the king’s scratchy, hastily drawn figure. As opposed to the soft lines on pages four and five, the quick brush strokes that make up Lear’s outline are almost synonymous with the thin lines representing the torrents of rain. Hinds presents an interpretation of this scene in which Lear, for an instance, has become the storm itself. From the entirety of Lear’s being, from his physical outline to the colors filling it, Hinds matches the storm-like cadence of Lear’s lines with a storm-like figure, exemplifying a combination that can only manifest to this extent in the graphic novel medium.
To create a graphic novel is not as simple as matching a picture with some text. Through the interplay between its panels and the gutter, the comic medium relies on the phenomenon of closure for its very existence. It is a form which requires more reader input and self-reflection than any other artistic medium. Because it gains its unique storytelling power through the addition and subtraction of images and text, the graphic novel lends itself, not only to original narratives, but also to the adaptations of other works. “The dance of the visible and the invisible is at the very heart of comics” (McCloud 205). By choosing which moments in a fight scene to omit, Hinds is able to focus audience attention on emotional conflicts in a very physical scene. Through the positioning and elimination of the gutter, comic authors like Hinds and Appignanesi can shift audience perspectives through the manipulation of time, allowing them to create a visual representation of an intangible feeling, paint a scene that can not only be seen but felt. A great graphic novel does not just paste an image of the text’s descriptions, but molds the visuals to match one’s own understanding of the narrative. Pollock’s eccentric, surreal drawing style may be confusing and cartoonish, but it reveals his personal perspective of the play as, not a tragedy, but a production of the grotesque. The real-world impossibility of his depictions gives him the freedom to provide scenes that would be otherwise jarring and absurd in other mediums. Because none of the play’s characters are given detailed descriptions, the graphic novel artists’ illustrations of their physical forms can only be made of interpretation and imagination. As shown by Hillyer’s animalistic Goneril and Regan to Hinds’ diversity of color and style, it is not only to the interpreter’s advantage to showcase their opinions, but it is impossible to hide them within this graphic medium. The true strength of the comic is how personal it is. From its grammar and structure of panels and gutters to its need to interpose text and image, the graphic novel lives on subjectivity. It requires adaptation to create and interpretation to read. As a relatively young medium, the comic is subject to a myriad of harsh criticisms and dissenting opinions, but, as new artists and authors discover, experiment, and take full advantage of all the tools that the graphic novel has to offer, it would not be surprising to see comic artists eventually reach as reverential a status as Shakespeare himself.
Bibliography
Appignanesi, Richard. King Lear. SelfMadeHero, 2009.
Hinds, Gareth. King Lear. Candlewick Press, 2009.
Kott, Jan. “King Lear or Endgame in Shakespeare Our Contemporary.” 1966.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1994.
Pedri, Nancy. “Thinking about Photography in Comics.” Image [&] Narrative, vol. 16, no. 2, 2015. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/802
Pollock, Ian. King Lear. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2006.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear, edited by R. A. Foakes, Bloomsbury, 2018.
