I tip my hat to one of our web wizards for sending me news that Marvel comics plans to make a graphic novel out of Stephen King’s The Stand. Now this comes as a report on something King said last week on NPR, so one can’t be entirely sure that it’s true (Marvel has not yet commented). But as far as things people said on NPR last week go, this statement—“Marvel is going to do The Stand as a graphic novel”—seems pretty unequivocal.
The Stand is, by many standards, a major book. Sure, it has its issues, in particular a final third where King strives so hard to make everything seem important that the finer dramas and insights that he has spun out thus far become ridiculous. But on the whole, and in particular in the terrifying detail and nuance of its post-apocalyptic vision (as well as the fabulous depth of some of his characters, especially the more preposterous of them), it’s hard to deny that it’s anything short of kickass. (Reviewing King’s latest, Duma Key, in the Los Angeles Times in January, Richard Rayner noted that “no other popular novelist, perhaps no other contemporary novelist period, can take recognizable, ordinary people and put them through the wringer with such cackling panache while always keeping sight of their humanity. King’s characters are always fixed in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day, wearing silly sneakers or scarfing down luncheon meat out of the fridge, and that’s a huge part of his gift and success.” I think that’s exactly right and would like to associate myself with the argument.)
Moreover, in a testament to its resonance, The Stand pervades, often in unlikely places. The Internet tells me it is somehow connected to Lost, though as I’ve never seen the program I can’t independently confirm that. Anyone who has read it and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road would be lying were they to deny the parallels. And Junot Diaz’s almost inconceivably good 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, found room for King amidst its Tolkien infatuation. (“All the other boys his age avoided the girls like they were a bad case of Captain Trips”; “Despite Nataly’s homeliness and the medicated fog she inhabited, Oscar entertained some pretty strange Harold Lauder fantasies about her.”)
So a good idea, right? I mean, everyone agrees the book’s really cool, and graphic novels are alright, too. But The Stand in graphic novel form will almost certainly not work, because the idea violates a simple Stand axiom: the more you abbreviate it, the worse it is. Some, perhaps most notably my friend Sean, have made the argument that the book isn’t worth experiencing in its original published form because so much had to be cut for publication; these purists would direct you instead to the “Complete and Uncut” version, which was released years after the original. (A quick bookshelf check shows my mass-market paperback of the original to be 817 pages; the uncut version in the same format is 1141.) I have only read the original, and thus cannot comment on this point.
But I have watched all six hours of The Stand miniseries, which aired on ABC in 1994. And by watched I mean watched when it was on originally, and also in one sitting on a Saturday a few months ago. Despite being given every opportunity to rule—teleplay by King himself, massive budget, Gary Sinise—the miniseries is pretty much terrible, and most of the problems arise from the elision of the novel’s enormous operatic scale to a less enormous, yet still basically operatic, television scale. (Though the inexplicable casting of a Dave Coulier look-a-like as Randall Flagg doesn’t do it any favours either.) The real issue is that, stripped of the weight of King’s detail-laden prose, the story becomes carried away with its own silliness and pretension. It is not the ultimate novel of good and evil, and once you take away everything that makes it such a compelling read—stuff that does not translate well into more visual media—it becomes obnoxiously self-important and laughably bad.
In the same NPR segment, King noted that one of the reasons he was eager to see his work transformed onto the other kind of page is because “Comic books are almost like movies on paper.” Well, Stephen King, that’s kind of exactly the problem here. Your awesome cameo notwithstanding, there wasn’t much to recommend the last time The Stand was almost like a movie, so why would anyone think it would work well this time? King made another admission: “I have a tendency to say ‘yes’ to projects rather than to say ‘no’ just because I’m curious. I want to see how things turn out.” Well, sir, get thee to Blockbuster. The last debacle’s still available on DVD.
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