Benoît Mitaine (editor) - Comics and Adaptation

COMICS AND ADAPTATION

COMICS AND ADAPTATION

EDITED BY Benot Mitaine, David Roche, and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot

TRANSLATED BY Aarnoud Rommens and David Roche

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Originally published in 2015 by Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal as Bande dessine et adaptation

Copyright 2015 by Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal

This edition of Comics and Adaptation is published by arrangement with Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal.

Translation copyright 2018 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mitaine, Benot. editor. | Roche, David, 1976 editor. translator. | Schmitt-Pitiot, Isabelle. translator. | Rommens, Aarnoud. translator. | Translation of: Mitaine, Benot. Bande dessine et adaptation.

Title: Comics and adaptation / edited by Benot Mitaine, David Roche, and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot ; translated by Aarnoud Rommens and David Roche.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2018] | Originally published in 2015 by Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal as Bande dessine et adaptation. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018003404| ISBN 9781496803375 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781496815323 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496815330 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496815347 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496815354 (pdf institutional)

Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.Adaptations. | Motion pictures and comic books. | LiteratureComic books, strips, etc.History and criticism. | Film adaptations. | Television adaptations.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C36 C665 2018 | DDC 741.436dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003404

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

DAVID ROCHE, ISABELLE SCHMITT-PITIOT, AND BENOT MITAINE

JAN BAETENS

THOMAS FAYE

NICOLAS LABARRE

CHRISTOPHE GELLY

LAURA CECILIA CARABALLO

BENOT MITAINE

ALAIN BOILLAT

DICK TOMASOVIC

JEAN-PAUL GABILLIET

PHILIPPE BOURDIER

PIERRE FLOQUET

SHANNON WELLS-LASSAGNE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the 2018 Edition

We are very grateful to University Press of Mississippi for giving this book a chance, to the anonymous reviewer for her/his support and feedback, and to PU Blaise Pascal for their backing. Thanks to Leila Salisbury for her initial interest, and especially to Vijay Shah and Lisa McMurtray for seeing the project to the end with diligence and enthusiasm, even in the heat of the summer! It was a pleasure to work with copyeditor Peter Tonguette again.

Translations of non-English quotes are our own, unless the works cited include the authorized translation. More thanks than we can ever possibly muster are due to Aarnoud Rommens, whose painstaking work was precious, and warm thanks also to Jan Baetens for recommending Aarnoud! Wed also like to thank Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Christophe Gelly, Nicolas Labarre, and Shannon Wells-Lassagne (twice!) for their input on the translation, and the American publishers (Fantagraphics and IBooks Graphic Novel) for image reprint authorization.

As always, love to our families and friends.

For the 2015 Edition

We would like to thank the Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, especially Aurlie Boucheret, Sylviane Coyault, and Alain Montandon, who backed up this project early on, as well as Sylvie Crinquand and Myriam Segura-Pineiro from the Centre Interlangues (EA 4182) of the Universit de Bourgogne. Thanks to Odile Wavresky, our wonderful librarian in Dijon, and to Sandra Eva Boschenhoff, who generously sent us the useful article she wrote with Frank Erik Pointer. This book, as well as the two symposiums in which it originated, received funding from the Conseil Rgional de Bourgogne through the PARI Les discours visuels, a project administered by the Centre Interlangues. We are grateful to all the speakers who attended the symposia, the authors who put in a lot of hard work in their chapters and abided by the deadlines. Finally, warm thanks are due to the artists (Robert Crumb and Lorenzo Mattoti) and publishers (Casterman, Edicions de Ponent, Ikusager), who graciously authorized us to reproduce certain images, and thanks to Jean-Paul, who knows why.

COMICS AND ADAPTATION

Introduction: Adapting Adaptation Studies to Comics Studies

DAVID ROCHE, ISABELLE SCHMITT-PITIOT, AND BENOT MITAINE

Many critical, historical, and theoretical studies devoted to comics state their intention to defend the medium as soon as the opening lines. This book abides by that tradition: studying comics remains, today, an act of aesthetic and political legitimatization, of which the insistent usage of the term ninth art by fans and scholars is just one of the many symptoms. It is only proper to acknowledge it.

If film studies gained recognition in the 1960s, with film departments opening in North American and British universities (Sklar 300; Leitch 244), research on comics and graphic novels really took off in the 1990s. By proving that comics, like paraliterature, should be considered as an aesthetic form with cultural import, Umberto Ecos 1962 essay The Myth of Superman

For a long time, the term adaptation has been synonymous with film adaptation. George Bluestones 1957 book marked the birth of film adaptation as a central concern of both film and literary studies. This interest gave way to a full-fledged branch in the wake of Brian McFarlanes 1996 Novel to Film, which calls into question the idea of fidelity that had long been the thread of discussions on film adaptation. In 1993, Andr Gaudreault and Thierry Groensteen organized a conference in Cerisy, France, entitled La Transcriture, i.e., transwriting; the proceedings, published in 1998, contain several articles on comics and adaptation. The Association of Adaptation Studies was founded in 2006, and in 2008 two academic journals, Adaptation and Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, were launched.

Although the edited volume Film Adaptation (2000) deals exclusively with film adaptations of literary texts (mainly novels), its editor, James Naremore, regretted that most studies of adaptation showed little interest in other media and popular culture (1, 12). The publication of Linda Hutcheons A Theory of Adaptation in 2006 was, in this respect, a major turning point. Defining adaptation as an intersemiotic transposition from one system of signs to another (16), a new encoding that adapts the source to a different play on conventions and signs, Hutcheon analyzes all sorts of mediaillustrations, video games, theme parks, opera, ballet, and comics (xiv)proposing, for instance, case studies of the different avatars of Carmen in literature, theater, and opera (153). Adaptation, for Hutcheon, can even be conceived from a Darwinian perspective. Reprising the theory Richard Dawkins developed in The Selfish Gene (176), she compares stories to memesi.e., ideas that are transmitted by mutating in order to adapt to changes in the environment. In so doing, adaptation, which associates both conservation and novelty, becomes the process by which a cultural heritage of stories, characters, and myths survive through evolution (167). Her very inclusive approach does not, however, lead to a boundless definition of adaptation that would entirely equate it to intertextuality, even though the two are closely linked. Moreover, Hutcheon clearly shifts the discussion away from comparative discussions that often boil down to establishing a hierarchy between the adapted work and its adaptations: an adaptation is a work that is second without being secondary (9). She nonetheless raises the question of legitimacy by underlining the paradox that adaptations are often looked down on, even though they are increasingly popular on the contemporary artistic scene (2). Economic motivations alone cannot explain this adaptation craze, as the pleasure of the viewer or reader aware that s/he is consuming an adaptation always depends on a tension between his/her memory of the adapted work and a taste for novelty (172). Hutcheon identifies three criteria necessary to define an adaptation: