How comics are adapted from literary sources as well as brought to the screen

Benoît Mitaine is associate professor of Spanish at the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France. He is coeditor of Lignes de front: Guerre et totalitarisme dans la bande dessinée and Autobiographismes: bande dessinée et représentation de soi.

Benoît Mitaine's profile page

David Roche's profile page

Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot is retired associate professor of English at the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France. She has coedited Intimacy in Cinema: Critical Essays on English-Language Films and published widely on English-language cinema.

Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot's profile page

Aarnoud Rommens is an independent scholar, editor, and translator. He is author of Joaquín Torres-García: Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction and editor of Comics and Abstraction: Narrative by Other Means.

Aarnoud Rommens' profile page

Comics and Adaptation is one of the rare books that provides a useful tool set to approach and understand this particular creative moment. Hopefully, the ultimate outcome of this text will be a revived and more focused approach to comics adaptations of all stripes that befits their undeniable cultural relevance.

Communication Booknotes Quarterly

A timely and useful collection which challenges some of the presuppositions of adaptation studies. . . . Comics and Adaptation is a welcome addition to the work on both comics and adaptation and is valuable reading for scholars in either area.

The Comics Grid

The edited volume considerably furthers research on this topic through its able blending of theoretical meditations, analyses, and case studies. . . . [It] succeeds in encouraging research on the topic (and perhaps even the existence of adaptation) through the way it convinces readers to approach adaptation and specifically comics and adaptation with an open mind, to see the creative opportunities.

Image & Narrative

The editors? theoretically broad introduction to Comics and Adaptation does not augur well for typical fan com readers, but in elevating comics beyond mere illustration it does set up the framework for the scholarly essays that engage how adaptations of comic and graphic novels transcend their literary sources. The editors cogently argue for the legitimacy of studying comics through the filter of adaptation studies. The international coterie of academic contributors they have gathered explore pertinent concepts from polyphony, hypertextuality, orality, shattering figuration, transposition, and dissolution of forms to captions and speech balloons in contrasting the sources and extensions of graphic comics. Among the works treated are 120, rue de la Gare, Sin City, Watchmen, and Fritz the Cat. The volume is divided into two parts: the first examines adaptation from the page to the panel, and the second explores it from the panel to the screen and back again, with vividly illustrated, framed images. In particular, Mitaine's essay on the adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's classic short story “Le Horla? stands as an exemplar of these fascinating studies, all of them translated into lucid English for the benefit of Anglophone readers.

CHOICE, February 2019, Vol. 56, No. 6