Beowulf

This is a big book, 8.5”x12” format, which helps sell it as an epic, with the heroic, larger-than-life figures going at it in a giant mythic landscape. The double-page spreads, most often given over to climactic points in the hero’s three great battles (against the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and finally a dragon), feel like paintings in a coffee-table art book and you want to enjoy them at scale. But they also mean that you can get more out of the inset art, which in a regular-size comic is harder to read.

I also thought that in most respects this was a faithful adaptation of the Old English poem. The colour scheme favours a bloody-fiery scale of reds, and Beowulf looks like his nose has been busted a fair few times, along with picking up a cauliflower ear. The monsters are believable, with Grendel’s mom maybe looking a bit too much like the Xenomorph from the Alien movies. But the dragon is pretty original, given that there’s less artistic leeway when it comes to drawing dragons.

There were a couple of odd interpretive flourishes. Grendel seems to fall in love with the naked, sleeping Beowulf, fingering his penis and then ejaculating all over him when Beowulf awakes. I wonder what that was all about. I do wonder.

Then a lot is made of Beowulf as an older man feasting at his hall. There is a focus on his mouth as he’s eating, with close-ups of his teeth and his tongue and even one cell that gives the point of view from inside his mouth as he pours a drink down his gullet. I can sort of see wanting to emphasize the eating, but I didn’t think this worked. It felt like overkill for a point that wasn’t that important in the first place.

As W. H. Auden said of the poetry of Yeats: “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” Perhaps that was part of what was meant in making such a big deal out of all the eating. Because we end on an interesting note, with the words of the Old English text appearing in print and then being digitized before finally taking the form of this graphic novel. It’s remarkable that the story of Beowulf has hung around as long as it has, but to have that kind of afterlife means putting a lot of work into adaptation, or digestion in our cultural guts.

Graphicalex