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Friday, September 3, 2010
A great and curious show
The Great and Secret Show
There aren't enough men who write well about magic.
It seems that those who do find a powerful medium in comics. Maybe it's the visual nature of the field, unhampered by the financial constraints of film or television, but more appropriate than the straight text of prose. Maybe it's the collaborative nature of the beast, where writer and artist work hand in hand like a coven of two. Maybe it's the outsider nature of comics, that wandering through the gutters feel that a shaman of a storyteller might find comfort in.
Maybe this is why IDW Publishing has begun an adaptation of The Great and Secret Show, based on the bestselling novel by Clive Barker, one of his generation's best at understanding the primal, wet and organic nature of magic.
I'll always recommend the original over the adaptation. It's just the way of things. Especially comic book adaptations, which, while unrestrained in terms of creativity or budget, are always restrained by available space, particularly when adapting novels.
Somehow, though, the creative team on this particular adaptation have found, if not the spirit of the original, a sort of rhythmic, almost hypnotic feel to The Great and Secret Show that make it readable and also strangely welcoming, in the way only books about magic can be.
For the unfamiliar: The Great and Secret Show is a good old fashioned magic epic, less about good versus evil and more about differing viewpoints. It sets former mail clerk Randall Jaffe -- who uncovers "the art" of magic though the dead letter office in Omaha and begins his journey into demi-god status with a quick and brutal murder in that same office -- against the more alchemy-minded Richard Wesley Fletcher over access to Quiddity. It's this ocean, see, and it's... complicated. The novel is the first in a series by Barker.
The words "breezy" and "Clive Barker" don't often run together, but adaptor Chris Ryall has somehow managed it, allowing Barker's dense writing to flow lightly across the comic's pages. Artist Gabriel Rodriguez's pencils are alternately grotesque and beautiful--and he's also a strangely inspired choice for the book. His work is that raw, flamboyant style more popular a few years back, crossing McFarlane-esque exaggerations with an almost graffiti-like flare. In other words, nothing like what a Clive Barker story would look like.
Thing is, it works. Barker's a merchant of the grotesque, after all, even if he works more from the mucus and mutilation scene than energetically freakish.
The color palette, provided by Jay Fotos is also entirely un-Barker-ish, creating a brightly lit and damned near lush environment for this tale of blood and magic to expand into. It's
Love him or hate him, you've got to appreciate a pop culture icon who continues to throw props out to the comic book industry ("Comics still give me a woody," he told Wizard a while back--okay, so it's not a love letter, but still, it's meant as flattery). Which makes it a bit odd that he's not the one handling the adaptation himself, at least given the propensity for writers from other media to give it the old college try these days.
Maybe it's a matter of knowing thyself, though--Barker worked with Marvel back in 1993, and more recently with IDW on an adaptation of his Thief of Always, and was quoted this time around as saying these adaptations can very much work when the original creator is comfortable with the folks doing the translation. In other words--when someone whose skills the creator trusts is doing the work.
(Which could be read as, when the creator isn't doing the translation. See Nabokov's nearly 500 page screenplay adaptation of Lolita for examples of reasons why the original scribe isn't always the best candidate for the job.)
When Barker isn't going for shock value, there is a certain poetry to his words, always has been, and it isn't entirely surprising to see an unexpected level of beauty to this new project. The ebb and flow of his words, and the way his naming of things feels like a small bit of magic itself, carries over well into our little part of the world.
The Great and Secret Show is expected to be a 12-issue run, and it has Midnight Nation written all over it--that is, a complete, well-crafted comic existing in its own little mythos, flying just slightly under the radar.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
