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!