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Friday, September 3, 2010
Graphic Classics: Arthur Conan Doyle
Review by Michael May
Written by Various
Illustrated by Various
Published by Eureka Productions
$11.95
Written by Arthur Conan Doyle, Rick Geary, Tom Pomplun, J.B. Bonivert, Milton Knight, Antonella Caputo, and Rod Lott; Illustrated by Neale Blanden, Rick Geary, John W. Pierard, J.B. Bonivert, Roger Langridge, Milton Knight, Nick Miller, Simon Gane, Peter Gullerud, and George Sears
It’s all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fault. My life-long love affair with genre stories began when I read my first Sherlock Holmes book. That I discovered a love of mystery then isn’t surprising, but Doyle’s descriptions of foggy, London streets and murder most foul also led directly to an adoration of horror. And because of Doyle, I discovered guys like Edgar Rice Burroughs, then Ian Fleming, and eventually Robert Heinlein and J.R.R. Tolkien. Doyle grew tired of Holmes, who he felt overshadowed his other work, and killed him off, but had I lived in Doyle’s day, I would’ve joined the rest of the world in demanding the return of the world’s greatest detective.
The second volume of Tom Pomplun’s Graphic Classics series takes Holmes’s popularity into account by adapting two of stories about him: “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” and “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb.” I’ve read several volumes of the Graphic Classics series now and it’s unusual for Pomplun to select more than one of the same kind of story from a single author. That he’s done so here speaks volumes about how well-loved Holmes is.
These two stories are similar in more than just their lead character though. Both are mysteries about innocent people who are unwittingly hired for nefarious purposes. But Doyle could take similar subjects and do very different things with them, and the adaptors of these two stories recognize that and have taken very different approaches in re-telling them. Rick Geary adapts “Copper Beeches” in a traditional comics style by letting the illustrations and the dialogue do all the heavy lifting and being very stingy with caption boxes. In “The Engineer’s Thumb,” Rod Lott and Simon Gane are more generous in their use of captions, but then their story particularly calls for it since most of it is told in flashback. The artistic styles are just as appropriately diverse. Geary uses lots of lines to create a rustic, almost woodcut look for his story of a young woman serving as a governess at a country estate. Gane, on the other hand, has an angular, sinister style that’s perfect for the tale of a hydraulics engineer who’s hired to repair a mysterious machine.
Doyle’s second most famous creation, The Lost World’s Professor Challenger, is missing from this collection, but Pomplun does include another of Doyle’s recurring characters, Brigadier Gerard. Antonella Caputo and Nick Miller, who adapted “The Crime of the Brigadier” for Pomplun’s Adventure Classics, return to the character here with an adaptation of “How the Brigadier Came to the Castle of Gloom.” As in the Adventure Classics story, Miller’s caricature-like style is perfect for the silliness of the Brigadier’s tall tales.
As usual with the Graphic Classics series, Pomplun includes several obscure stories with which to broaden readers’ perspectives of Doyle’s work. There’s a pirate tale called “Captain Sharkey,” a science fiction piece called “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” a poem entitled “Master,” a thriller named “The Great Brown-Perricord Motor,” a ghost story called – appropriately enough – “The Ghosts of Goresthorpe Grange,” and a one-page parable called… well, “A Parable.”
Doyle was justified in wanting an audience for his other work. He was capable of a lot more than just mysteries, although hardcore Holmes fans know this because Doyle would play around a lot with different moods and storytelling techniques even as he was helping to invent the Mystery genre. Of the non-Holmesian material in this collection, “Captain Sharkey,” adapted by Pomplun himself, is the stand-out story. It’s told from the perspective of a sea captain who’s nervously trying to get back home to England, but who unfortunately has the misfortune of encountering a particularly nasty pirate. It’s not a romantic, swashbuckling story, but a chilling one, made even more effective by the frenzied linework of John W. Pierard. It makes me want to track down more of Doyle’s obscure works to see what other gems are there. Which, I think, is precisely Pomplun’s motivation for including it.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
