Pow!: Marvel Comics Adapts Jane Austen

In an attempt to carry young female readers over the threshold of the comic book store, Marvel has been adapting Jane Austen’s fictions as eye-catching graphic novels. So far, Marvel has reimagined Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Northanger Abbey. Each is ably abridged by writer Nancy Butler and visually interpreted by different teams of illustrators, color artists, and letterers, and then produced serially in five, loose-magazine numbers that, at the close of a run, are also reprinted as an all-in-one paperback. The experience of reading the individual numbers differs from that offered by the paperback format, since the latter omits the original advertisements for other Marvel products. The worlds of Highbury and Pemberley tend to appear differently when Spiderman, Captain America, or Thor peer in from facing pages!

Turning a classic book into a comic strip is not an entirely new concept. For the last six years, the Marvel Illustrated line has adapted literary classics to the graphic novel format—not just swashbucklers, but toughies like The Iliad, Moby-Dick, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. As early as the 1940s, the Elliot Publishing Company already turned classic novels into comic books with its successful Classic Comics series, which included Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe at ten cents a copy. Forty years later, in 1984, Pocket Classics condensed Pride and Prejudice into a comic strip format (as a small four-by-seven paperback of sixty-nine pages). So, although Marvel’s claim of adapting Pride and Prejudice “as a graphic novel for the first time” is slightly overstated, its graphic Austens, with high production values and one-hundred-and-ten large, color pages each, are far more comprehensive than any predecessor, and their edgy and brightly colored artwork is nothing like the thin black-and-white line drawings of yore.

While these graphic adaptations of Austen’s stories all nod to their Georgian settings, Marvel is not in the business of historicizing: none of these artists reaches for visual styles that Austen herself knew, such as the cartoons of Gillray, Rowlandson, or Hogarth. Instead, each modern illustrator inflects Austen’s brand with his own hallmark aesthetic. In the hands of Spanish illustrator Hugo Petrus, Pride and Prejudice oozes sensuality in a velvety palette of browns and dark greens. Sonny Liew’s artwork brings out the social satire and humor of Sense and Sensibility, with bobbleheaded characters whose rosy cheeks suggest either strong drink or innocence. The pale sherbet colors and doe-eyed figures of Janet K. Lee raise the sugar content of Emma, making it perhaps too saccharine, “too light & bright & sparkling,” to quote Austen’s letter to Cassandra describing Pride and Prejudice. While Lee, with the help of color artist Nick Filardi, significantly adjusts her approach to suit Northanger Abbey—using heavier outlines, more iconic features, and darker colors—her perky style cannot conjure up the Gothic of Catherine’s visions. Even so, Lee’s architectural realism energetically animates the Bath section of that novel.

In all four cases, Butler distills Austen’s plot into bits of dialogue that fit neatly into speech bubbles. She, like screenwriter Andrew Davies before her, is smart enough to stick close to Austen’s original text and lift the best lines. By her own admission, Butler has a harder time with Sense and Sensibility, which contains less outright dialogue to crib. As a result, some scenes translate into the graphic novel format better than others. For example, Liew’s caricature of the foppish Robert Ferrars picking out a toothpick case matches Austen’s tone with perfect pitch. But Elinor Dashwood’s doubts about Edward’s feelings lose their pathos when placed inside thought bubbles. Willoughby’s rescue of Marianne, however, proves ideal for the...