Guest post from creators Adam and Lisa Murphy: On the process of translating famous stories into graphic novel form
As part of putting together CorpseTalk: Groundbreaking Women, we decided to do a short adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, to accompany her interview. The process was so fun, and the end result so good, that we decided to do one for every interview in CorpseTalk: Dead Good Storytellers. Which is how I found myself trying to produce short comics of everything from The Odyssey to Peter Rabbit!
The first thing is of course reading as much as possible. Note the operative words “as possible” – the deadline for these short comics is usually a week or two, so the pressure is to jump into writing as soon as possible. In many cases, I’d read the books already, and spent some considerable time processing and digesting them. In some cases, I was able to read a whole book quickly. But movies and Cliff notes were frankly necessary in places – after all, we did War & Peace from scratch! (I’m pretty confident the comic is every bit as good as it would’ve been if I’d read the whole thing cover to cover – possibly better actually). But in the course of doing CorpseTalk for the past 10ish years, I’ve just gotten very good at parsing what is relevant, what needs to go in vs what can be cut, what is a decent historical consensus vs what is a fringe theory (or maybe what is less historically well-grounded but seriously too good a story to miss out). Also, there’s a degree of back-and-forth: usually after a first draft, there will be a few places where it’s clear I need some more research, or go back and read the original text, to flesh out my understanding or find some more juicy details.
Which leads to the most important weapon in our writerly arsenal – multiple drafts! For a long time, I did all the scripting of CorpseTalk on post-its, moving them around on a page to add or remove panels and slowly figure out the flow and content of the comic. Now I do it digitally, but the process is much the same: writing a first stab at which scenes to include, how to frame them, setting up essential information the reader is going to need down the road, taking out bits that just don’t fit. The hard constraints of the project are helpful here – the page count is not flexible (usually 4 pages – I have gotten a few more on occasion, but even then, the new page count is still a hard limit). All of which puts a hard limit on the number of words and the number of story beats that can go into each comic. So there’s a lot of back-and-forth with both Lisa (first editor) and Anthony (“real” editor at DFB). Sometimes, some great bits have to be cut (I was especially heartbroken to have to leave out the lovely John Wemmick and his Aged P. from Great Expectations). But with a degree of hard-nosed acceptance of the project constraints, it generally becomes pretty clear what is the top priority, and what has to get cut.
CorpseTalk is generally a funny comic – at least that’s the goal. We’ve found the format is able to handle some serious subjects as well (Anne Frank springs to mind), but even then, there is a definite CorpseTalk tone. Often the jokes go in last (or not at all…) Basically, I follow the method of Chesterton’s Duke of Chester (…when he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.) But often, once the other stuff is in place, jokes do start to come. In these adaptations, the humour often from rather sly commentary in the narration or speech bubbles playing off nicely against actual quotes – I was especially pleased with how funny Macbeth became under this treatment – who knew?
- Thanks to Adam and Lisa Murphy for a wonderful guest post. Corpse Talk is available now, RRP. £9.99, from David Fickling Books (A copy of this book was provided as part of a promotional blog tour)
