Challenging Adaptation Studies: A Review of Comics and Adaptation

Comics and Adaptation, edited by Benoit Mitaine, David Roche and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, translated by Aarnoud Rommens and David Roche, University Press of Mississippi; 238 pages, 2018, ISBN 978-1-4968-0337-5 This review discusses the contents of the edited collection Comics and Adaptation (edited by Benoit Mitaine, David Roche and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, translated by Aarnoud Rommens and David Roche, University Press of Mississippi 2018) and comments on the translation of the text. The review concludes that this is a timely and useful collection which challenges some of the presuppositions of adaptation studies.

Given current Hollywood tendencies toward making superhero movies, adaptation should be something that is obviously linked to comics: after all, comics are adapted all the time into films, cartoons, toys and so on. Yet the scholarly literature connecting comics and adaptation is quite scant: there is the collection Film and Comic Books (Gordon, Jancovich and McAllister 2007), which deals with the connections between films and comics, and there are individual case studies of adaptations into or out of comics in journals and books, but it doesn't feel like there is a critical mass of work discussing how comics are both adapted into other media and also adapt texts from other media.

Benoît Mitaine, David Roche and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot's edited collection
Comics and Adaptation (Figure 1) brings together scholars working on adaptation and comics and gives this area of scholarship a key reference point. Originally  which has published some of the most interesting writing on comics in recent decades, including translations of Thierry Groensteen's work (Groensteen 2007(Groensteen , 2013.
It's good to see a collection of predominantly French scholars being translated into English, especially given how French and American comics traditions differ and the distance between comics scholarship in French and English.
The collection seems like a move towards an internationalisation of comics studies, which was a trend mentioned in the introduction to the recent Routledge Companion to Comics (Meskin, Cook and Bramlett 2017: 2), and this is to be welcomed as it is all too easy for scholarship in other languages to fly below the radar of English-speaking readers.
The book consists of an editors' introduction and two sections. The first of these focuses on the adaptation of literary texts into comics and the second focuses on the adaptation of comics to film. The introduction does a great job of contextualising the collection in relation to current work in adaptation studies and comics studies. Its overview of the movement from fidelity to intertextuality in the research on adaptation will be useful for readers who are not so familiar with the ways in which adaptation studies has developed over the last twenty or so years, and especially since Linda Comics and Adaptation is a welcome addition to the work on both comics and adaptation and is valuable reading for scholars in either area. The case studies all offer an original approach to the text, though I found those that tried to escape the confines of a binary approach to adaptation, as Baetens suggested, more interesting and successful. It's also nice to see here case studies that I was unfamiliar with and a willingness to look across linguistic boundaries, while at the same time touching on the more obvious English-language examples. The discussion of literary adaptation in comics is welcome, too: it reminds readers that comics also adapt other texts for a number of reasons.
There were a number of frustrations for me while reading, however, not least of which is the relative absence of discussions of transmedia production, which would develop some of the notions of adaptation presented here. Admittedly, there's a risk that transmedia as a concept would supplant the notion of adaptation in some of these cases (e.g. the Marvel and Castle examples). Translation is also mentioned as a concept in several essays, but this angle is not developed, despite the expanding work in translation studies that could help provide frameworks for analysis and problematize some of the notions that persist in adaptation studies such as fidelity.
The translation of the text is also worth a mention: while I have no doubt to its reliability, I found myself thinking that these texts were very French in their argumentation and style (e.g. they tend to prefer abstract nominalisations over concrete verbs). This is not necessarily a problem, and a theorist like Lawrence Venuti would argue that fluent style should be challenged to allow access to the foreignness of the work (Venuti 1995), but I did wonder whether or not they would be so effective

Evans: Challenging Adaptation Studies
Art. 1, page 7 of 7 for English-language audiences. That said, the essays are generally well-argued and accessible.