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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Time Out Blows Hot & Cold About Graphic Novels
Posted: March 31, 2011
Last week, London listing magazine Time Out included a review of the Tamara Drewe DVD by Carol Barker, who wrote: “...it’s hard to feel sympathy for the characters’ ‘problems’, particularly Tamara’s, who remains as paper-thin as her comic-strip roots.” One wonders if this DVD reviewer has properly read Posy Simmonds’ original graphic novel. If she had, she might have discovered how different it is from the lighter, slighter movie adaptation by Stephen Frears. To give film-goers a happy ending, Frears chose to avoid the tragic demise of one major character and in doing so also omitted a lot of the ramifications about teenage despair in rural England.
This is not the first example of the complex source material in comics being richer and deeper than the cinematic confection brought to the screen. Carol Barker also makes more than a suggestion here that the reason Tamara seems so shallow in the film can be put down to the fact that she originated in a comic-strip, where characters are inevitably “paper-thin”. Read or re-read Tamara Drewe and you’ll find that Posy writes with real depth and subtlety of characterisation.
This week, I’m glad to say, the Books section in Time Out leads off with a whole page by Daneet Steffens covering Hair Shirt and Baby’s in Black from SelfMadeHero and Vignettes from Ystov and The Rime of the Modern Mariner from Jonathan Cape, all of them very positively critiqued and three of them illustrated. More proof that comics can be anything but “paper-thin”.
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