The Original Super-Hero Comic? - Engaging Cultures …ecv.missouri.edu/Word and PDF/Issue...

The Original Super-Hero Comic?

ECV: Engaging Cultures and Voices Issue 7, 2015

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The Original Super-Hero Comic? Harlow Stewart Sanders University of Missouri, Columbia

No, it isn’t the epic poem. No, it isn’t likely to fascinate both scholars and novice readers

for millennia to come. But Gareth Hinds’s graphic novel Beowulf is powerful. And though his

retelling fails, ultimately, to capture the full sweep of the great Anglo-Saxon epic—perhaps too

tall an order for this still-emerging literary genre—its graphic elements enrich and deepen the

Beowulf legend beyond the inherent limits of an exclusively verbal text. What’s more, this

Beowulf may provide teachers with the perfect hook for those reluctant students who seem to

delight in proclaiming that they hate to read.

The epic poem Beowulf, of course, is famous in literature as the first work written in the

English language though it is, in fact, a Germanic story. Indeed, the Old English in which it was

written is in many ways closer to modern German than to English (inflectional word endings, a

host of grammatical cases, guttural Germanic consonant clusters, etc.). But the version of the

poem that survives is thought to have been copied by a Christian monk living and working in

Britain and using the language common among members of the dominant culture in the British

Isles at that time (c. AD 750), the language from which modern English, over a period of about a

thousand years, evolved.

The epic is also famous on the strength of its literary merit. It is a rhythmically

compelling alliterative work of Anglo-Saxon verse that sounds well when read aloud, which is

how the Anglo-Saxons would have known the poem, its having existed in an exclusively oral

tradition for probably hundreds of years prior to being written down. Furthermore, it depicts a

psychologically complex, larger-than-life Germanic hero whose strength is said to equal that of



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thirty men, who swims for days on end in full armor, who is invincible in battle against ordinary

nations, and who vanquishes sea monsters and hideous landlubber-trolls alike, all for personal



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fame and for the health and safety of the Geat people. But if the saga’s central character were no

more than a boasting Viking Superman, I doubt whether its appeal to readers would have

endured for the last twelve- or thirteen-hundred years.

To be sure, the inordinate guilt with which the hero of the poem wrestles when informed

of the marauding fire dragon—and which endears him to the modern reader, possibly, for the

first time in the story—is omitted from Hinds’s graphic novel version. Similarly, Hinds strips the

Unferth and Wiglaf characters of the human richness that, in the all-verbal text, makes them so

appealing to readers. Still, Hinds’s Beowulf is significantly more than a Nordic über-he-man.

And what I find most important in the author-artist’s work is that he conveys his

character’s depth not through verbal means alone, but through the deft exploitation of a

combination of techniques unique to his chosen genre, techniques that no doubt stretch well

beyond the imagination of the cloistered Briton who first wrote the story down.

For example, the half-closed eyelids and stoic gaze of Hinds’s protagonist bespeak a

keen, wary, analytical mind.



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The firm-set jaw and impassive mouth—not to mention the ripped physique (see below)—

suggest the strength and courage of one capable of singlehandedly guarding the safety of a nation

for half a century. What takes the poet dozens of lines to communicate, the illustrator has

convinced us of in a single frame.

Similarly, Hinds’s highly abstract depiction of Scyld Scylding’s funeral boat and the

attendants at its embarkation lend the scene an eerie, magical quality that befits the back-story to

a heroic tale spanning all of Scandinavia and portraying cataclysmic events over generations.

The gestalt effect of the horizontal (altered here according to the rules of 2-point perspective)

and vertical lines, together with the blurred-edged text boxes and an almost-uniform blue wash,

create a kind of dream state that helps prepare the reader for the fantastic tale about to unfold.



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And, again, the illustrator has accomplished in a single frame what the poet needed pages to

achieve.

Contrasting the fantasy world of the Geats’ distant past, Hinds depicts hyper-real splashes

of black blood emanating from Grendel’s latest victims as he stands facing the entrance to

Hrothgar’s mead hall.

These seem gristly indeed, thanks to the long, straight motion lines indicating the great speed and

force with which the Danish soldiers have been slaughtered. The closure technique on which

Hinds has relied to “describe” the slaughter has both aided and enhanced his reader’s

imagination: without question what has transpired was horrific; and the extent of that horror,

because the scene has been left for the reader’s imagination to conjure, is unbounded.



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But the same technique can serve a calmer purpose, too. The four panels below get

progressively larger as Beowulf draws nearer to the Danish shore.

Here closure has been used to convey a sense of vast scale, as well as a relatively long span of

time, through the essentially silent images that grow steadily larger. If the petulant reader

complains that the medium of literature-based film robs him of the fruits of his imagination—a

protest I have often lodged after seeing favorite novels brutalized by movie directors—the same



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accusation cannot be leveled against the graphic novel. There’s plenty here for the reader’s

imagination to do.

Many other comics features enhance Hinds’s book. There are lots of sound-effects words

like “twang,” “thwok,” and “whang”—the use of “skutchlp” to accompany Beowulf’s shattering

of Grendel’s elbow seems particularly vivid—and bold type is frequently used to draw the reader

in, as shown on these pages:



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All capitals are used to suggest that Beowulf’s first words at the Danish court are called out

loudly, if not shouted: “HAIL TO THEE, KING HROTHGAR!” And on the two textless pages

just before Grendel enters the story, the most abstract panels in the book to this point depict the

shadow of the Danes as they close the doors of Heorot on Beowulf and his men.

These seemingly innocent shadows begin a long, steady crescendo of suspense that will

culminate five pages later in the pitched battle between Beowulf and Grendel.

I especially like the “motion lines” that I interpret as a deafening roar in the panel where

Beowulf and Grendel meet, face to face, for the first time:



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Then for the next eight pages of that confrontation, the irregular shapes of the panels serve to

convey the pandemonium caused by the titanic struggle between man and monster. And the fact

that about a dozen panels are crammed onto every two-page spread suggests a fast pace. When

the fight finally “slows down” to full-page panels of the combatants, the reader gets the clear

sense that Grendel is exhausted and the hero’s victory virtually won.

I am also intrigued by the washed out colors of Part Three, the Fire Dragon episode, that

seem to suggest the hero’s decline—now that he’s at least seventy years old—and the fact that

he’s finally about to lose a fight, his last fight, the one in which he dies. The artist often zooms in

for dramatic effect, as he does on the page where the runaway slave takes the jeweled cup from

the dragon’s lair. The close-ups of the dragon’s eye at the top and center of the page portray the

dragon’s keen awareness of the thief at a glance, in an instant:



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And the searing flames of the dragon’s breath are depicted to good effect in the “bleached out”

white on the page where Beowulf struggles to protect himself with his shield. Words would only

be in the way here:



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A humorless bookworm of a critic might quibble with the varying scale of the depictions

of Grendel, both his full body during the battle in Heorot and his severed head as Beowulf

surfaces from Grendel’s mother’s lair:



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And, yes, Hinds’s Beowulf is bigger than the other Geats and the Danes, but should he be this

much bigger (below)?



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Literarily speaking, I miss the pathos in the hero’s considering for the first time in the story the

possibility of losing a fight as he prepares to do battle with the fire dragon. In this case, I’ll take

the poem over the graphic novel. But I would argue that the starkly contrasting black and white

inset, where Grendel’s mother is shown in a crouching position, glaring out of the tops of her

eyes, looks so sinister and depraved that in it Hinds achieves a level of terror likely to surpass

even the seasoned reader’s imagination:



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Indeed, I congratulate Hinds on his realization of Grendel, whose description in the OE text is

frustratingly vague and fraught with contradictions. Hinds manages to depict a naked, muscular,

man/beast whose talons and fangs and proportions (generally) jibe with the description of the

monster in the poem, while rendering at least marginally credible the poet’s claims that Grendel

was (1) capable of taking out thirty men in one fell swoop, and (2) able to clasp hands with the

Geat leader and lose.

The task Hinds has undertaken with his graphic novel is ambitious. What need has the

English-speaking world for a reworked version of its seminal text? But Hinds’s book is wrought

with sufficient intelligence and sensitivity to the nuances of the ancient poem that it will

inevitably delight even the most reverent scholars of Old English and its heroic literary tradition.

And still there’s that reluctant student at the back of my class—perhaps your class too—who,

half way through the school year, has yet to turn in a book review. To him I will relish saying,

“You think you hate to read? Check this one out, kid!”



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Work Cited Beowulf. Adapted and Illustrated by Gareth Hinds. Somerville: Candlewick, 2007. Print.

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