Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words?
July 25, 2007 by Elijah
So, the other day I finally broke down and bought the first issue of Marvel Illustrated’s The Man In the Iron Mask, which I discussed before. I suppose when you come right down to it I really do have to give anything based on a Dumas work at least a small shot. Pity I wasn’t too impressed.
Already one sets a large task for oneself in adapting a Dumas novel to a six issue mini-series; alot of cuts are going to happen. When that “novel” is in fact only the last third of a longer novel… which is itself the third novel in a trilogy… well, you’ve got alot of background stacking up against you there. Now, I’m not saying that it can’t be done, but my hopes aren’t up too high for this particular try at the moment.
A quick summary of the plot follows: Somewhere around 30 years after The Three Musketeers, an amorous Louis XIV is pissing off alot of people–some, but not all, of our one-time heroes included, and so one of them plots to put someone else on the throne. That someone else being the King’s identical twin brother, whose existence is a secret, and who’s confined to the Bastille. That’s a very abbreviated version of the plot.
Coming back to the comic, Hugo Petrus’ art is serviceable enough, nothing too impressive, with the exception of a few times that a very friendly face suddenly assumes a frightening grin. There is, however, one major flaw in the art, which is that when we are given a comparison between the King and his twin… well, the two faces really look pretty damn different. Whoops.
The writing is done by the stalwart Roy Thomas, who’s been with Marvel since the 60’s. Yeah, I didn’t know that he was writing anymore either. Too bad then that he doesn’t really do much writing here. Instead of truly adapting the story he seems content to just snag bits of it word for word, which doesn’t come off very well. Without the weight of the characters’ histories, (everything before this book is summed up in four quick pages) and with so many little personal touches being excised (one of my favorite scenes ever between D’Artagnan and Athos is included, but what makes it great is lost, although it would only have taken a couple panels) we get all of the potentially stilted nature of old dialogue without the parts that make it work. It all came across as very wooden to me, which it really shouldn’t have, especially considering that my love for the characters and the story should’ve been more than enough to iron over certain problems.
It isn’t that I can’t accept the story being cut down, mind you, I’m fine with that. I think where the problem comes in is that it was all edited to fit into a comic book, but nothing else was changed to help it work in its new medium. I think this is often the problem with “classics illustrated” sorts of things. For example, this comic is full of narration boxes (even more than in a Claremont comic!) and sometimes they tell us things that we really don’t need to know, or that could be conveyed in better ways.
Moments later, the Bishop of Vannes left the Bastille… where the secret which overwhelmed him seemed to double the weight of the walls.
A nice little sentence in a novel, but superfluous in a comic book. As another example, it seems very out of place for a narration box to tell us that a newly introduced character is planning a great fete for the King, when comic book storytelling logic would dictate that the character himself say it, or some such.
Long story short, this didn’t give me much of anything that I couldn’t get from the original book. The story isn’t so much adapted to the comics form as it is shortened and presented with some pictures. Clearly, I don’t plan to continue buying the series, but then again, who knows…? I mean, I have no idea what part of the story this upcoming cover is supposed to be, but it does look pretty bad-ass, so I might change my mind.
