ENGL362
Talking Pictures
As part of the third-year module ENGL362: Talking
Pictures, students take a piece of text and adapt it to
pictorial narrative form, then write a critical essay on
the process and its outcome. Drawing skills are less
important than demonstrating, through creative practice,
an understanding of how comics work and the narrative
potentials of the form. This year the module leader Dr
Julian Ferraro picked out Kimberley Nicholls’s work. Kym
is a graduating BA English student who adapted Italo
Calvino’s 1979 novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller.
If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveller, by Italo Calvino,
is a 1979 postmodern novel
known for its particularly
complicated format. The
novel alternates between
two narrative modes: the
first is a frame-narrative
set in the second person,
following the character ‘You’
as he fruitlessly tries to find
the next chapter of the book
he is attempting to read.
The second is the opening
chapter of each book he
finds along the journey novels, ostensibly related to
one another, that perpetually
end on cliffhangers. A
key theme of the novel is
the relationship between
literature, publisher, and the
individual reader.
Nella Cotrupi (1991) makes
two points about the
novel that are particularly
pertinent in demonstrating
why Calvino’s style is well
suited to adaptation into
comics. First, she states
that: “connective strands
that bind together the
world’s material phenomena
as well as humanity’s
intellectual products is a
reigning preoccupation with
Calvino, and is imagistically
conveyed repeatedly in
this novel through the
metaphorical leitmotif of
converging,
enlacing,
intersecting, and radiating
lines.” My adaptation strives
to portray these lines as
not just metaphorical, but
tangible, actualised out
of necessity as well as
design. Since comics are
an art form dependant on
the drawn line, they are an
ideal connective tool with
which to bind ‘humanity’s
intellectual products’ from
the mind to word, from
word to image. Cotrupi
also makes reference to
Calvino’s statement about
contemporary novels, as
“an encyclopedia, as a
method of knowledge, and
above all as a network of
connections between the
events, the people, and the
things of the world” (1991).
The ‘network of connections’
is a perfect summation
of the way a comic page
operates, particularly apt for
the ever elusive role of the
gutter. Postmodern fiction,
particularly Calvino’s work,
has tremendous potential to
adapt to a comic series.
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This project adapts the
opening chapter of If on a
Winter’s Night a Traveller
into a comic book format,
but also includes a firm
structure for an adaptation of
the entire novel. The unique
publishing methods of the
comics industry complement
the fragmentary style of the
novel; the contemporary
heavy reliance on the
selling power of first issues
(#1s; see Alonso, 2015)
in the comics industry, for
example, has been utilised
to represent the novel’s path
through the numerous first
chapters. The adaptation
has been designed to fit into
the publishing parameters
of
Image
Comics,
a
mainstream US publisher
formulated
around
the
maxim of full creative and
editorial control for writers
and artists over everything
from setting retail price to
designing cover schemes
(Image Comics, 2016).
I have made two major
alterations to the source
material: first, to try and
maintain
this
affiliation
between the reader and
‘You’, between physical