Comics have a long history with the transformative practices of adaptation. The medium’s earliest years saw characters like Krazy Kat, the Shadow, and Superman hurling from the pulps to comics to animation, radio, and film. Meanwhile, long-running comics series such as Classics Illustrated, and recent graphic novelizations of popular fiction and educational material, continue to extend the reach of canonical works into comic book shops. “Adaptation and Opposition Through Comics” probes this long history and thinks through more recent debates surrounding comic book adaptations of the literary canon. Our proposed panel examines how graphic fiction might reimagine, rewrite, and supplant existing literary texts, but also how other media forms might reimagine, rewrite, and supplant works that are originally in comic form. Our panel draws on works of literature ranging from King Lear to Dracula, and from Parable of the Sower to Watchmen, and engages with various types of media, including film, comics, drama, and installation art.
Jarrod DePrado’s presentation thinks through questions of canonicity and adaptation in comics, while considering the effects of counternarrative and race-bent adaptation. DePrado focuses on a little-discussed manga adaptation of King Lear, in which Lear is recast as an aged Indigenous ruler struggling with budding European control over his land in 1759 on Lake George, New York. Although the manga attempts to offer a counternarrative, DePrado argues that its adherence to Shakespeare’s plot and a historical narrative makes it only partially able to adequately provide the historical reckoning and revision that seems to be its implicit aim.
Dr. Murphy’s talk discusses John Jennings’s work in graphic adaptations a site of revision. Murphy also examines John Jennings’s graphic novella Protocol and Response, as well as his reworkings of two Octavia Butler texts, as a reactivation of a living archive of the Black present amidst the continuous violent disruptions of anti-Black terror. Murphy argues that the graphic novella functions as a counter-history to violent property laws but also as a necessary visual addendum to the “Before We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the novella was commissioned. She reads Protocol and Response for its function as a fabulative gutter that disrupts the colonial logics of the museum and responds to the violence of archives, and considers Jennings’s work as a critical and necessary counter archive and counter adaptive practice to anti-Black violence.
Nicholas Dertinger returns us to questions of canon, remix, and identity, attending to modern graphic fiction that reshapes Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to reflect contemporary cultural anxieties. His paper examines the literary legacies of these Gothic icons through two modern comic book series: Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque’s American Vampire and Victor LaValle’s Destroyer. Dertinger argues that American Vampire and Destroyer do more than adapt their source material—they critique and expand upon the original texts, addressing fears specific to modern society.
Finally, Harry Foster’s paper analyzes how adaptations navigate audience expectations, historical exclusions, and the nuanced performances of BIPOC actors. Focusing on Jonathan Majors’ portrayal of Kang the Conqueror (Loki and Antman and The Wasp: Quantumania, 2021–2023), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen, 2019), and Lauren Ridloff’s Makkari (Eternals, 2021), Foster explore how these casting choices shift the racial and gendered ontology of the original characters, producing new cultural narratives. By framing these casting choices as both adaptation and cultural intervention, Foster argues that race- and gender-bending in comic book adaptations does more than increase diversity—it actively reinterprets the source material, shaping new pathways for representation.
Guided by shared thematic concerns, we expect that the conversation succeeding these presentations will touch on multiple relevant themes, including: comic books’ relationship to the literary canon, the challenges in adapting other forms to graphic narrative, graphic adaptation and specific genres, adaptation for specific audiences and contexts, political debates concerning adaptations of literary works through comics, historical correctives and thought-experiments in comics adaptations, and representations of comics within other literature and media. Each presenter will present for 15 minutes or shorter, to allow for adequate discussion and moderation time. Taken together, it is our hope that these papers—like the objects they study—will open up points of dynamic overlap, as well as routes of productive departure.