Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven: A Graphic Novel by Duncan Long (review)

For his graphic novel version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," Duncan Long chose to illustrate Poe's most famous poem in black and white rather than color—a good choice. One Amazon reviewer, for instance, calls the graphic novel "moody, artistic and provocative." The cover of the book (which is also available as a Kindle edition for $2.99) features a raven sitting on a tree branch against the backdrop of a mist-obscured moon, and the very first page of the work features a lonely house in silhouette against the gray and white moon—appropriate accompaniment for the opening words of the poem: "Once upon a midnight dreary …" (1). Dead trees surround the house, contributing to the dreariness of the scene, and subsequent panels augur the impending arrival of the title bird as it flies through the night toward the house.

This raven, however, is not simply the feathered doomsayer of Poe's original, as a clever juxtaposition of shadows suggests when the narrator believes that "some visitor" is "tapping at" his chamber door (8). In this case, the belief is not simply a mistake resulting from the narrator's drowsiness. Indeed, Long's apparitions on these early pages foreshadow the raven's change in gender, as Long later substitutes female pronouns for male pronouns in lines like the following: "Not the least obeisance made she; not a minute stopped or stayed she" (23). Why is the raven female in Long's version? In Long's text, the raven has not come merely to beguile the narrator's "fancy into smiling" (26) or to torture the narrator with its refrain of "Nevermore" as the narrator inquires of the bird whether there is "balm in Gilead" (33) or the hope of ever again clasping "a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore" (35).

When we first meet the narrator, a bearded scholar, we find him poring over "forgotten lore" by candlelight, his candle holder a skull whose provenance may be rather gruesome (5). Indeed, a smoky image arising from the extinguished candle a number of pages later suggests foul play. In both Poe's original and Long's treatment, the "lost Lenore" has apparently perished, but Poe's lyric allows the reader the freedom to imagine how Lenore met her end, leaving Poe's melancholy narrator utterly forlorn. Long does not allow his reader the same room for interpretation vis-à-vis Lenore's demise; the mode of Lenore's immolation in the graphic novel is not open to guesswork. Long has added an element of overt fiendishness to Poe's "The Raven," coupling Poe's words (for the most part) with illustrations that not only depict, but narrate. As a result, the most significant sequence of illustrations—one that adds a grisly new perspective to Poe's poem—occurs in the middle of the graphic novel and coincides with Poe's line "But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er, / She shall press, ah, nevermore!" (M 1:368). Long has taken the original narrator's dismal association of Lenore and a chair, and turned it into something sinister (28–30).

Interestingly, a noticeable change to Poe's poem—in addition to the aforementioned pronouns—involves the omission of an entire line of "The Raven." Long writes, "'Wretch,' I cried, 'thy God hath lent thee—/ by these angels he hath sent thee / Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore'; / Quoth the Raven 'Nevermore'" (31–32). So read the last three lines of the stanza. Long has left out the penultimate line from Poe's original: "Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!" (M 1:368). It is unclear why Long does not include this line in the graphic novel. Perhaps the word "kind" does not jibe with Long's pictorial suggestion of malevolence, or perhaps the phrase "lost Lenore," again, undercuts the pictorial narrative in its...