Bloggers Jared and Sean begin an epic discussion of Stephen King’s The Stand
Above: Mike Perkins’ take on The Stand for the new Marvel Comics adaptation (left), versus Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations in the original book. Click to see larger image.

Last week marked the release of the first installment of a thirty-part comic book treatment of Stephen King’s The Stand, published by Marvel. Along with our new comics blogger, Sean Rogers, I’ll be reviewing each installment as it hits the shelves; hopefully our conversation will offer some sort of insight into the both the comic and the novel, and into the way in which our ideas about stories form and change. It’s a big undertaking, and we’re sure to be frequently late; forgive us.

The Stand: A Conversation will take place on The Shelf and Four-Colour Words, alternating between them with each monthly installment.

Before we begin the review in earnest with next week’s consideration of part one, we talked about our expectations.

* * *

From: Jared Bland
To: Sean Rogers

I’ve been meaning to write about this series for weeks now, especially since I got a look at the advance preview, the interviews with the creators Mike Perkins and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and the really silly web video. I’ve written about the idea before a few times, and while I still share some of the same reservations I had months ago, almost everything about the project that I’ve seen since lodging those first complaints has led me to believe that this thing might actually avoid being terrible.

My initial arguments against the idea were based on the inherent difficulties of adapting what is large and detailed to a format that’s smaller and less detailed, which stemmed from my and others’ observation that what makes King’s writing actually interesting is the incredible detail with which he draws his lives. I wrote:

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. 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. 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.

Having recently seen most of the miniseries again on a rainy day at a cottage belonging to some friends, I’ll note that this assessment still seems true to me. Yet the comic’s advance material has gotten enough right to make me a little more optimistic than I was originally. To me the big plusses at this point seem to be a) the distinctly character-oriented nature of the advance preview and b) the structural breakdown of how the creators intend to tell their story. The preview book featured sketchbook character studies of several major characters, which fleshed out artist Mike Perkins’s interest in the books “abundance of well defined characters.” And then the news came that the thirty book series will feature ten (or is it five—reports vary) issues on Captain Trips, fifteen on the coming together, and five on The Stand itself. This structure will allow for enough attention to the very excellent disease, a long period of exploration for the novel’s Boulder period, which is where some of its more interesting sociological considerations occur, and a mercifully brief denoument in which, one hopes, the foolishness and floating hands will be kept to a minimum. Which is a long-winded way of saying that, by the numbers, one has to think that these guys might get it right.

But there are still lots of ways to fail.

Jared

* * *

From: Sean Rogers
To: Jared Bland

I’ll agree with you that this adaptation of The Stand has already won me over at least a little simply by retaining the novel’s gigantic unruly enormousness. The worst of my preconceptions, upon first hearing of this project, had to with the length: I imagined we’d be getting a limited series of comic pamphlets, released over a handful of months, rushed into collected form, and not totalling more than 300 pages. As you’ve pointed out, and as the TV series proves, this method is all wrong for The Stand. I was happy to learn that the comics would be coming out over the course of years, not mere months, and would have a final page count that approaches King’s original. The novel has a comfortable bloat to it, a sense of lived time, and as you’ve said this comes about largely because King’s rangy, untamed prose allows for breadth and scope in the events he depicts. Any good adaptation of this material requires the same space and freedom to be just as broad and detailed as King, and to make just as many off-the-wall mistakes. I, too, am particularly looking forward to the lengthy Captain Trips sub-series, which is by far the best part of the book (except for when it deals with the ol Good versus Evil), is probably the most visual (given all the road-tripping and gruesome deaths by tube-neck), and contains the best set-pieces (Larry in the Holland Tunnel, Stu escaping the research centre in Vermont).

Another aspect of the adaptation I’ve been dreading from the outset has been the art. I’m sure breaking down King’s prose into a panel-by-panel script is no easy feat, but at least in some sense the writer’s job is already done – there’s not much room to stray from the narrative that already exists, unless you do it by way of excision and reduction, like the TV series. The art, on the other hand, faces not only the problem of “casting” that plagues book-to-movie adaptations (I mean, I love Molly Ringwald and all—but still, seriously?) but also, since this is comics we’re talking about here, the very real possibility that the art might just suck brutally hard. I’ve said elsewhere that the strengths of the King comics I’ve read—not that they’re especially strong strengths, mind you—owe much more to the art and cartooning than to any plot or character that we could look on as King’s contribution, since these remain pretty two-dimensional.

You’re right, though, that what makes The Stand succeed as a novel, and what will make it succeed as comics, doesn’t result from any kind of stand-out imagery, and so won’t result from any kind of demonstrative cartooning, but instead depends upon the thrust of the narrative and the clarity of the storytelling, what you call the weight of his detail-laden prose. When Marvel announced this adaptation, I started to think which cartoonist might actually suit this material—certainly not Bernie Wrightson, whose illustrations in the expanded edition of the novel get almost everything wrong, from their endlessly doom-ridden tone to the clenched-teeth character design, and end up looking as ludicrous as any mid-’80s hair metal LP. It wasn’t until I saw the first previews of the artwork by Mike Perkins that I realised just how wrongheaded my cartoonist-first approach was—The Stand needs to be a cartoonist-last comics series. This is not to slight Perkins’s work that I’ve seen, but rather to remark on the way in which he relies on a brand of slick realism, bearing few marks of personal idiosyncracy, that finds virtue in transparency and exists more as a conduit for story rather than a statement of individual style. I gather this practice is typical in many Marvel and DC superhero books these days, but it never occurred to me that it might also be the best way to access the world that King has already created—that is, to channel the book, rather than filter it through an artist’s own sensibility. Of course, you could say the TV series adopted this same transparent approach to disastrous effect, and you’d be right, so…

Anyway, this thing is going to be long, the artwork looks to be suitably unassuming, we’re starting off with the least ridiculous, most awesome part—I’ll run out and buy issue #1 and we can get rolling with more thoughts.

Sean

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Posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 4:57 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.