Marvel’s superhero comics have already shown that the medium is ideal for depicting action and adventure. The Marvel Illustrated imprint takes it to another level with graphic novel adaptations of some of the greatest adventures and stories in classic literature. Series editor Ralph Macchio talked to us about the adaptation process, upcoming projects and how fans of Spider-Man’s adventures may find themselves equally intrigued by the works of Herman Melville and Alexandre Dumas.

BookShelf: Why adapt literary classics into graphic novels?

Ralph Macchio: Well, I think you have a good possibility to bring in a new audience because of the visual representation. Literary classics can be intimidating – they can be quite thick in terms of page count and the translations and language can often be archaic and difficult to follow for young readers. Our hope with the graphic adaptations of these classics is that the visuals will entice young people to pick them up and realize that this material is there for them too.

BookShelf: How did you select which titles to adapt?

Ralph Macchio: The first title we adapted was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which was selected for us by our CEO Alan Fine. The Last of the Mohicans is Alan’s favorite literary work, and when we were discussing this project in the beginning he wanted to open with it. So that was our first book, the one we cut our eyeteeth on. Following that, I was left on my own to pick and choose the other titles, which were Treasure Island and The Man in the Iron Mask. After The Last of the Mohicans we were already in adventure mode, so we looked to classics that were adventure oriented, that would resonate with a younger audience.

What was nice was that these initial titles were so successful and well received that we were able to do follow-ups, including The Three Musketeers, which was done by the same team that did The Man in the Iron Mask. The Three Musketeers actually comes before The Man in the Iron Mask in terms of story, and we hope that anyone who enjoyed that effort would be excited for this one as well. We also did Kidnapped, which was a special request from Dan Buckley, our publisher, using the same team that worked on Treasure Island, although we did use different cover artists for each series.

The covers turned out to be something special. We first adapted these stories in a series of comic books before collecting them into hardcover graphic novels. For comic books, the cover is extremely important; it needs to attract people so that they will see the comic and pick it up. A reader is hit by visuals in a comic book store, so you really need to create something that stands out. We gave a lot of attention to the covers and went out of our way to find top-notch painters, who created covers that beautifully complimented the stories and the idea of classic literature.

BookShelf: How does the graphic novel medium help to bring these stories to new readers?

Ralph Macchio: The visual element is something that, if a kid goes into the store or a library, he is more likely to see these titles and want to pick them up, even though this is someone who may never have heard of Kidnapped. When you see these stories visually, there’s something very appealing about that, and a young person might find that a little more accessible than just text alone.

BookShelf: What does the adaptation process involve? How do you make decisions on where to preserve text, where to make cuts and which themes to highlight?

Ralph Macchio: After we have selected the novel to be adapted I speak to the writer; nine times out of ten this is Roy Thomas. Roy is a top-notch professional, with a great deal of professional experience adapting literature into comic book works with his work on Conan, so he really knows how to break a novel down and transpose it into the graphic novel medium. He also has a literary background and worked for many years as an English teacher in Missouri.

After deciding which titles to adapt I call the writer, and then he will read the original novel and begin the process of deciding what we can keep in the adaptation and what we need to jettison for reasons of space. With this in mind, we decided early on that we did not want to do any adaptations in one issue. By spreading the adaptations out over five and in certain instances, such as with The Odyssey and The Iliad, as many as eight issues, we were able to give the stories room to breathe. Rather than just summarizing events, getting the opportunity to adapt these over so many issues really gives us a chance to tell the story.

After reading the source material, the writer does an outline, breaking the story down into separate issues. He sends me an outline with one paragraph for each issue, describing what is going to happen. Once I’ve approved this, he will write out a more detailed plot for the first issue, taking into account story flow and visual detail for the artists.

The penciller will then do all the pencils for the issue based on this information, and after this the writer will then script all of the dialogue and caption writing for these pages. One of our concerns with dialogue was a question of how much did we want to modernize the classics. In some cases, the language is so archaic that it has to be modernized a bit to be accessible to readers, but we made a decision to try to adhere closely to the flavor of the dialogue and the narration from the original texts. Moby Dick, for example, has a lot of information about whaling that we were not able to keep, but we really concentrated on communicating the whaling experience visually to the readers; we felt it was important to give them the sense of being right there in the story, on the Pequod with the other characters.

What we have done also to preserve the language is provide each issue with a glossary in the back, to define words and terms that might not be recognizable to modern readers. In some rare instances we have also included an asterisk next to a word with a footnote defining it on the same page, if we felt it was important to understand it right away without having to break from the story to look it up in the glossary.

For Homer’s works – The Iliad and The Odyssey – which are really from the oral tradition, we obviously couldn’t work with the source material so we had to pick a particular text for everyone to work from. In these cases we had to pick a translation, and the question was how authentic to make it sound. These stories are thousands of years old, and we wanted them to sound authentic but also to be intelligible for modern readers. We’ve been pretty lucky with our decisions; from what we’ve been hearing back from libraries and bookstores, they’ve been received pretty positively.

Another thing I’d like to point out about the adaptation process is that since these works are first adapted as comic books, you have to find some kind of natural break in the story to end each issue. You need something to close the issue that will also bring the reader back for the next one. So some of the normal comic book conventions come back into play, where you end issues with cliffhangers and narrative hooks. Part of the writer’s job is to find natural breaks in the original stories that can be adapted this way.

BookShelf: As editor, do you need to work closely with the original text?

Ralph Macchio: The writer is the guiding force behind the actual breakdown, so he needs to be very familiar with the original text. I’d like to point out that the artist also has to be conversant with all of the visuals involved. Many of these stories are period pieces, so the artist needs to know everything about the architecture, costumes and hairstyles of the time being depicted. We have to compile a great deal of visual reference for this; the story has to have a real sense of authenticity to resonate with readers. With The Iliad in particular we went out of our way to compile a great deal of reference – all of the armor and the shields, the helmets and everything in the book look as authentic to the age as possible from the visual reference we were able to compile.

There are also instances, such as in The Odyssey, where the artist has to create their own idea of what something should look like. In The Odyssey, the artist had to visualize the Cyclops on his own. Even with the Gods you have to put a lot of effort into the visual interpretation because they are hugely important to the story. In order to distinguish them from the human character, the artist gave the Gods a very ethereal look, and we gave their word balloons a special color and texture as well to further distinguish them when we had them interacting with mortals. The artist had to create his own designs for the Gods and supernatural creatures, but to do this he had to be steeped in the visual feeling of what Olympus would look like. 

BookShelf: Working so closely with this material, what do you learn to appreciate most about it?

Ralph Macchio: There are a couple of things. Most importantly, in encountering these texts now, what I’ve learned by being reawakened by them during this exercise is really why they are classics: how much they have to do with the human condition. They may have been written a long time ago but the core of these stories remains relevant. In adapting them, you begin to see why they can speak as well to people today as they did two hundred years ago.

Another thing that’s interesting to notice is how some of these guys really could have used a good editor! They’re classics, but they’re not flawless. The most difficult one for Roy to adapt was The Three Musketeers. The plot is all over the place in Alexandre Dumas’ novel, which was something Roy really had to work through in the breakdowns. It was interesting to see how it might have been a different story with a little more editing. Moby Dick as well, has chapters and chapters on whaling, and we had to adapt it in six issues. Also, since we were working in a graphic medium, we wanted to be able to open up the visuals. In adapting Moby Dick to a graphic form, you once again revert to the conventions used in comic books. You think yes, Moby Dick is symbolic of Captain Ahab’s obsession, but also, this big white whale is a great visual!  And that’s something you really want to work with. When you get to the climactic scene where the crew of the Pequod is out in their whaling boats going after Moby Dick, you want the reader to have a real sense of being right there in that boat, and this whale is huge and overpowering. Visually, we kept instructing the artist to make Moby Dick bigger and more impressive; he had to loom over the scenes. In dealing with pictures as well as words, you do keep coming back to comic book rules. When the villain comes in, you give him a couple of big shots to impress him on the readers’ mind. In The Iliad, the Cyclops gets a full page shot, which instantly makes the reader aware that this monster is much larger than a man. That’s one of the best things we have to offer these stories in the graphic medium: with visuals, you can do impressive things.

BookShelf: How does editing an adaptation differ from editing an original series?

Ralph Macchio: From the editor’s point of view, it really isn’t that much different. I receive an outline, a plot and a script to work with, just as I do with other series. The real difference is on the writer’s end, because it’s a matter of dealing with a work of fiction that already exists, rather than the writer pulling it out of his head. The challenge for the writer in this case is in transposing the story from one medium to another. From my end, however, it is not much different in terms of the work that I do.

BookShelf: What are your plans for the future of the Marvel Illustrated imprint?

Ralph Macchio: Specifically, we are working on the following upcoming adaptations: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. We’re aiming for a great variety of material, both visually and thematically.

In a more general sense, our future plans involve the inclusion of more writers on the adaptations. Roy Thomas will continue to do the lion’s share, because he does them supremely well. But as we expand, we are also looking to use writers who might otherwise be associated with the type of material they’re adapting. For example, Pride and Prejudice is being written by Nancy Butler, who writes Regency romance novels and has won two Rita awards. So not only is she a good choice to adapt this material, but it may also provide a commercial hook, where readers of her romance work will also hear about and be interested in this project.

Similarly, we have Eric Shanower doing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He is well known as the expert on Oz, so not only has he done a great job with it but we can also draw upon this particular writer’s association with the material. Eric has already gone to an Oz convention and used the opportunity to do a slide show with illustrations from the first issue. It looks fantastic, by the way. It has a whimsical, wonderful quality to it. Eric’s scene descriptions are fascinating. There’s just so much detail in them. Then Skottie Young, the artist, found a unique way to make it all work. Skottie also took Baum’s original text and tried to conceive of his own look for the characters. The result has a really unique visual appeal.

Further on in the future I would like to take on some of the real heavyweights of literature, such as Faust, Paradise Lost and maybe Dante’s Inferno. All of these have incredible visuals to work with. The artists would have a field day! And at the same time they are some of our greatest works of literature, which would find new readers. I would love to adapt some of Kafka’s stories as well, such as The Trial and The Castle. Kafka’s work has a great deal of relevance today, with the sense of paranoia and alienation they convey.

We’d also like to go back to the great works of the ancient Greeks. Roy had a great idea which we are currently working on also with this. We found there is so much supplemental material about the Trojan War, and Roy had the idea to adapt it into a third volume  - The Trojan War – which will be a companion piece to The Iliad and The Odyssey. We’re in the middle of working on this now. It will be a five issue series which will then be collected as a hardcover graphic novel like the others. This will collect all the supplemental material leading up to and following the war. Roy brought up the idea and we loved it right away. A lot of this is material you really can’t get unless you’re a scholar, and we’ll be making it accessible in comic book form.

There have been a couple of surprises. For example, when someone came up with the idea of adapting The Picture of Dorian Gray. There are not a lot of visuals to work from in the original novel. But we were able to find an artist, Sebastian Fiumara, who could take simple conversational scenes and cast them at unsettling angles, and he also did amazing things with shadows and light to give a creepy feel to the story as it progressed.

BookShelf: What would you like teachers and librarians to know about Marvel Illustrated?

Ralph Macchio: What I would most like them to know is that we have been faithful to the source materials. The essential nature of the stories, what makes them classics, has been preserved. Because we have had the latitude to tell the stories over several issues, we have been able to take the works and adapt them without having to compromise much. You still need to trim some material in an adaptation, but we found ways to keep as much as we could. In The Last of the Mohicans, David Gabriel, our Vice President of marketing, had the idea to focus on the character of Hawkeye and do five page backup stories for each issue with supplemental material. We only did it for that series but I could see it being done again.

I would like everyone to know that we have taken a great deal of care to ensure that they are getting adaptations that are worthy of the source material. We have a great love of these classics, and we hope to reach new readers who will be attracted to the visual medium. Young readers might have heard of The Iliad as a classic, but not realize that it is a great war story! If they see it represented visually, it might be more intriguing to them and interest them in the original as well. By opening up the visual aspects of these stories and showing that they are tales of war, action and adventure, we hope to show their relevance to new readers, who might be tempted by the visuals to take the leap into a classic story they might have otherwise ignored.