Ryan North hasn’t forgotten his first read of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel shortly after high school. “I have a very vivid memory of reading the book behind the wheel of my car in a parking lot at night and eventually having to put it down because it was so overwhelming,” says the Canadian scriptwriter.
At the time it was unimaginable that he would one day translate the best-known novel by the American freethinker Vonnegut into a graphic screenplay. Like the Spaniard Albert Monteys, North is a true fan of the American writer. Together they realized the Eisner-nominated comic “Schlachthof 5 oder The Children’s Crusade”. Both had due
respect for the task.
“I was afraid of ruining a favorite book”
Monteys recalls briefly worrying about “ruining one of my favorite books,” and North insists he didn’t want to be the one who messes up Vonnegut. These fears have not come true, your comic to the successful novel is a terrific hit. In clear lines, rich colors and an irresistible rhythm, they tell the adventurous story of the war veteran Billy Pilgrim, who, like Vonnegut, falls into German captivity as a US soldier, survives the bombing of Dresden and is under these impressions all his life.
In addition to the realistic descriptions of the war, the novel is based on meta-excursions about remembering and writing and on absurd sci-fi elements that raise the novel to a universal level. Because the gullible veteran not only makes a career as an optician and survives a plane crash, but also reads the confused stories of an unknown writer named Kilgore Trout – Vonnegut’s alter ego – who writes about extraterrestrial beings who will later kidnap Billy. He learns on the planet Tralfamadore that time is relative and will henceforth travel back and forth through his life.
North and Monteys tell this wild story with impressive aplomb. They pull out all the stops of the ninth art to translate the different levels of the postmodern template into a graphic narrative. “A lot of what Vonnegut does in storytelling translates really well into comics,” explains North. He knows what he’s talking about, because he not only received numerous comic Oscars for his Marvel stories, but also wrote the scenario for the comic.
In it he tells the story as if it had always been a comic. “In the novel, Vonnegut paraphrases the crazy sci-fi stories of Kilgore Trout and calls him a failed novelist. So we couldn’t help but turn Trout into a scrapped creator of wild comics and show his misjudged retro magazines.”
In addition to such loving details, North also had to invent dialogue for some characters in order to keep the story alive. While he says it was far from easy “to make the dialogue sound like Vonnegut wrote it,” the comic reads like clockwork.
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The graphics by Albert Monteys, who translated the story into fantastically feather-light drawings, also contribute to this. “I wanted to keep the style and narrative simple and straightforward to give the inner structure of the story the space it needs to flow and unfold.”
His characters are real characters, and he relies on colour, atmosphere and historical decor to mark the crossing of temporal planes. It’s as if he poured Vonnegut’s deeply human, ruthlessly realistic and ironically light-hearted prose into an inkwell and then poured it back onto paper with the pen.
The attention to detail becomes apparent at the latest when Vonnegut’s motif “So it goes”, which marks death and transience, not only ties in with the texts, but also picks up on the events depicted. This very first graphic adaptation of a Vonnegut novel is more than just a successful adaptation: it’s a really awesome comic!