Saturday, October 31, 2009

Somewhere I Never Thought to Find Jane Austen

As I cruised through my local Borders today, I came across this:



The Marvel comic adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice! I've seen P&P in the theater, in the wonderful Colin Firth TV miniseries, as a book (of course), as a book with zombies (what?), but never before as a comic book.

I thumbed through it. I'm not a comic fan, so I can't tell you if it was well done or not. A comic book with no fantastical elements seems a little odd to me. An adaptation of the zombie version would have made more sense to me.

I'm fascinated, though, that this book was ever considered for publication. I know that there are a lot more women and teens reading comic books these days, but are they reading ones with nineteenth-century story lines? Perhaps I'm out of touch with the novel-to-comic crossover audience, but it seems to me that typical Austen fans are not also comic fans.

And most important, what is the magazine-style cover all about?

(Eeek! NaNo starts tomorrow! How exciting!)

3 comments:

TikiBird said...

I freaking love this. It's on my wishlist! I believe there were the comic books of P&P that were released a couple of years ago, but they recently put them all together to make one book, so I think that's what this is.

It reminds me of all the "Classics Illustrated" comics from the '40s-'60s (and apparently a little of the '70s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics_Illustrated). I love those, too. Hamlet was my favorite, although I haven't seen one in a long time!

I'm sure my alternate-universe self who is a high school English teacher would have a whole bookshelf full of these. :)

TikiBird said...

Maybe this will be more up your alley: http://www.amazon.com/Vampire-Darcys-Desire-Prejudice-Adaptation/dp/1569757313/ref=cm_lmf_tit_36_rdssss0. LOL!

Rebecca Chastain said...

I love that your English-teacher self would also collect these. LOL

I'm actually a little tired of all the Jane Austen, P&P remakes—it's sanctioned fan fiction, and I'm not a huge fan-fiction fan. There's too much original stuff out there.