Animal Farm

George Orwell's Animal Farm -- originally published in 1945, is an allegory, a fable, a cautionary tale about the emergence of a totalitarian state -- in a famyard. It's said that Orwell's strong take on his subject was formed by his experiences fighting the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37. The dictator Francisco Franco had declared war upon his own country, and like the "fasces" for which fascism is named, his bundle of sticks (that is, his armed forces) held together, and prevailed. The opposition, fractured by political infighting and attempts by outside forces to co-opt their forces, never really had much of a chance.

Orwell had originally sought to join the International Brigades, which were controlled by the Soviet-directed Communist Party, but found himself rejected by them because he was too much of a free-thinking, too unwilling to toe the party line. He then joined the Worker's Party of Marxist Unification. As fate would have it, this put him on the losing side of an internal split within the international Communist party, which pitted those aligned with Leon Trotsky against the central party under the control of Josef Stalin -- a fight which ended with Trotsky's assassination in Mexico in 1940. Disillusioned by the whole mess, Orwell initially wrote a nonfiction memoir, Homage to Catalonia (1938), but it received little attention at the time. At that point, it seemed to him that perhaps the best way to show the flaws of party-dominated "groupthink" was more by way of a parable than an appeal to reason.

It took a while to sink in. In the wake of the end of World War II, the gradual growth of anti-communist fervor in the United States made the book a target -- at times, for both sides. The first illustrated edition was released alongside the 1954 animated firm version, with illustrations by Joy Batchelor and John Halas, who had done the character art for the film (it's worth nothing that this was the first feature-length animated cartoon ever produced in Britain, as well as that it received much of its funding from the CIA!). Other noteworthy versions were illustrated by Ralph Steadman (known for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson) and Quentin Blake (known for his work on Roald Dahl's books). This new edition has been illustrated by Odyr Bernardi, a Brazillian cartoonist and artist born in 1967. His work hasn't been widely known in the US before, but his graphic novel Guadalupe, written in collaboration with the poet Angélica Freitas, was widely acclaimed.

So what is Animal Farm ultimately, about? Who are the pigs, and who are the heroic horses? Orwell himself identified as a socialist, but saw all too vividly the hazards of a "socialist" party that proclaimed "some animals are more equal than others." Your thoughts here.

The Jungle

For those who believe that literature can have a powerful, positive, effect on society, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) is both a heartening and a disheartening example. Sinclair's portrait of the horrific living conditions of recent immigrants to the United States, and his specific portrait of the horrors of employment in the meat-packing industry, had a powerful effect beyond the one it had on its immediate readers. It led, dramatically and directly, to the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which greatly improved conditions at these plants -- for the meat, at any rate. The situation of the workers, and of immigrant families generally, did not improve, leading Sinclair to comment, with some bitterness, that he had "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach." Sinclair's embrace of the worker's cause, and of the promise of organizing trade unions, was prescient -- but in his day, he was more often hated than praised for it, and it's quite possible that, were a similar such story to appear today, it might re-ignite some of these same debates, which perhaps have never really gone away -- for some, "socialist" is still as dirty a word as it was in 1906.

The Jungle has been adapted in many forms, the first being a silent film made in 1914. Sinclair admired the film so much that he appeared in person in it as a sort of prologue and epilogue; once its first commercial run was completed, he bought the rights to the original negative with the hope of having it screened to wider audience. Unfortunately, as with many films of this era, no print of this version survives, though one can get something of a sense of it from the movie posters and publicity materials. A new film version was planned in 2011 by David Schwimmer (There Will Be Blood), but it was never made. And, a few years earlier, our old friend Peter Kuper did a version for the re-booted "Classics Illustrated" series; Kuper's adaptation drew from the visual vocabulary of modernist art, making it in some ways feel closer to the period, though some readers found his version a bit too grotesque for their tastes.

Kristina Gehrmann is a graphic novelist and artist from Germany with quite a few major works to her credit, although her version of The Jungle is the first to appear in print in English. In 2015, her most substantial work -- Im Eisland ("In the Land of Ice") was published in Germany; it has since appeared in English as a webcomic, which you can read here. Filling three volumes, it undertakes to retell the story of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the Arctic, a voyage that began with optimism and cheers and ended with cannibalism and despair. As she did with Im Eisland, Gehrmann combines meticulously researched and detailed backgrounds, clothing, and historical perspective with a facial style that is somewhat more like that of Japanese manga than of strict realism. Within that style, though, Gehrmann conveys emotion with masterful simplicity, leading a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books to remark that “In many ways, Gehrmann achieves what Upton Sinclair never quite did: She makes the characters real and complex, and she makes the political story a movingly human one.” As with Kuper's Heart of Darkness, Gehrmann's Jungle is mainly monochrome -- except for the visitations of red -- as meat, as blood, as human blushes and fury -- which haunts these pages to wonderful effect.

So read the first half of The Jungle -- and post your thoughts about it here. And, if you like, you can phrase your comment as a question for the author; with her permission, I'll be passing along some of these questions to her, and we can have the rare experience of getting answers directly from the artist/adapter herself!

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, was originally published as "The Heart of Darkness" beginning in February of 1899 in Blackwood's Magazine. It appeared in book form in 1902, minus the "The" in the title. Numerous critics have hailed it as the essential book of the twentieth century; T.S. Eliot quoted one of its key lines in "The Hollow Men," and it was famously adapted for film by Frances Ford Coppola in 1979 as Apocalypse Now. It has become a grim epitome for a grim era, but is also one of the most economically and beautifully crafted novellas in English.

Which is no mean feat, considering that its author, Joseph Conrad, was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland, and that English was his third language (after Polish and French). Writing was also his second career, after a lengthy one as a seaman, rising from ordinary seaman to mate to Master from 1878 to 1886. In the process, he taught himself English, changed his name, and embarked on a long-sought career as a writer.

Peter Kuper grew up in Cleveland, Ohio -- which is also my own home town -- and that of graphic-memoir giant Harvey Pekar. Through Pekar, Kuper met the even more infamous Robert Crumb,  who helped him put out some of his earliest comics in exchange for some rare jazz records. Like Stanley Zuckerberg, Kuper attended the Pratt Institute, then went off on a series of travels around the world, all of which he graphically documented, before returning to New York, where he's continued to work as a comic artist and illustrator. In addition to Heart of Darkness, he's adapted a number of Franz Kafka stories, as well as illustrating a Spanish translation of Alice in Wonderland, Alicia en el País de las Maravillas.

His choice to tackle Heart of Darkness resonates here in 2020 -- why now? Why, some may ask, given the broad critique of the novel's racism by leading African writers such as Chinua Achebe, should such a book be chosen for adaptation today? Kuper himself addresses this in his "Art of Darkness" introductory essay. His approach, by his own account, was twofold: first to ensure that his representations of natives of West Africa were accurate, he conducted photo research in the archives; he also studied and worked to avoid stereotypical features or dress. Secondly, also whenever he could, he "flipped the perspective," focusing not on how Marlow and the white employees of the company saw the natives, but on how the natives saw the white people.

I'm not sure that either of these strategies completely succeeds. One strange effect is that the African figures in these pages appear, as it were, more realistic, while the images of white characters are made more cartoonish. At the same time, I think there are moments when he does succeed in opening up other dimensions of Conrad's narrative, and giving us pause over scenes that the original novel glossed over. So read the book -- be sure to read both introductory essays -- and see what you think, both about whether Kuper has succeeded in his effort to 'flip the script,' and also about the story and images as a whole. Post your thoughts here, referencing specific scenes when possible (you'll note that the book doesn't have page numbers).