The Minimal Apocalypse Gets Baroque: Reading "The Road"
Manu Larcenet's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" offers a fantastic lesson in adapting prose to other mediums.
Continuing in a series of comics adapting prose; previously: Secret Life.
There are a number of choices that must be made when adapting fiction into another medium. Among those are the overall fidelity to the source material, but it can go deeper than that, getting into the very meat of the way the story is told. I’m thinking here of director Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which includes narration read periodically by Joanne Woodward. It’s a bold move, eschewing the “show, don’t tell ethos,” but it largely works for me, in part because Woodward does a fantastic job with the role, to the point where I now hear her voice in my head whenever I read work by Wharton.
The final pages of Manu Larcenet’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road include the letter that Larcenet wrote to McCarthy asking for his permission to adapt his book. “I have no other ambitions but to draw your words,” Larcenet wrote — and spoke of his goal of adapting those words “without distorting them.” Reading Larcenet’s adaptation in light of that makes for an especially rewarding experience. (Full disclosure: we published an excerpt from this adaptation at Vol.1 Brooklyn last year.)
Some of McCarthy’s work is almost hallucinatory in its level of detail. For The Road, he opted for a different register; one that trades in minimalism to evoke a world that’s been dramatically reduced in the wake of an apocalyptic event. There’s also a compelling rhythm to it:
“He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke.”
Larcenet’s adaptation uses very different methods to achieve a similar effect. His use of color is minimal, and certain panels make striking use of negative space; the skies, for instance, are often depicted as a monochromatic wash or a gradual gradation between two neutral shades of color.
The Road tells the story of a father and son traversing the ruined remains of what was once the United States. The father seeks to protect his son; he’s also slowly dying, potentially of exposure to the environment through which two are proceeding. It’s in depicting these two characters that Larcenet takes a very different route: he draws them with a stark intricacy, one that recalls both medieval woodcuts and the art of Käthe Kollwitz.
It doesn’t feel like a direct adaptation of McCarthy’s prose as much as it evokes similar emotions — to say nothing of the implicit violence and horror of this world. You half expect to see a hooded skeleton dancing with a scythe in the background of one of the scenes.
Larcenet also uses the medium of comics in another powerful way, depicting the father’s coughing fits — which intensify over the course of the story — as a series of gasps consisting of the letter “H.” Again, it’s a memorable way to show that something is very wrong here, and it finds a way to do so that doesn’t simply involve restating McCarthy’s prose in its entirety.
Manu Larcenet’s The Road isn’t quite the same work as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but it does a fantastic job of evoking the same emotions as its source material. That it does so with a very different set of techniques is both a testament to Larcenet’s skills as a creator and the care he put into translating one medium into another.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
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