the way
Adapted from the novel: Cormac McCarthy
cartoonist: Manu Lassenet
Publisher: Abrams Books
Publication date: September 17, 2024
“It is difficult for a man to know his own mind, because he must use his own thoughts to know it. He can know his heart, but he does not want to. It is true. It is better not to look there. It is not the heart of the creature, it is Bound in the way God has designed it to be. You can find a mean side in the smallest of creatures, but when God created man, a creature that could do anything as well as make a machine. A machine’s machine. And evil can run on its own for a thousand years without having to look after it. Cormac McCarthy. bloodline
There is no denying that Cormac McCarthy is one of the greatest novelists of all time, and arguably the greatest American novelist of all time. His work is so powerful that you can immediately see the entire lineage of American novelists who influenced him, such as Faulkner and Joyce, and the immediacy but impossibility of American writers since trying to capture his prose density of the entire trajectory. Once you get into his style, with its polychouplets and lack of quotation marks, you end up in an almost meditative state, flowing from line to line like poetry. McCarthy’s work is challenging, violent, and nihilistic, but presented in the most beautiful way. Nothing can quite sum up the feeling of reading one of his novels.
As such, any attempt to adapt his work was an uphill battle, although when McCarthy’s work began to achieve mainstream success with the Border trilogy, several took up the challenge. all beautiful horses Made into a movie in 2000, No place for old people 2007, and the way 2009. reason No place for old people The greatest highlight of the work is that McCarthy originally intended it as a screenplay, making it perhaps his simplest and most straightforward novel. But when you delve deeper into his work, you will find that the novel is like bloodline and Sattertreeyou find yourself with prose so dense and formal that adaptation seems impossible. What McCarthy did with language had to be understood before it could be translated into the language of film, television, or comics, and even then it’s hard to say whether there’s any appropriate equivalence between what he did and the capabilities of other mediums.
It’s a tall order, and French cartoonist Manu Larcenet rises to the challenge in this graphic novel based on the comic. the way. The story follows an unnamed father and son as they travel across a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of food. They travel, camp, eat, and start the process all over again every day. In both the book and the graphic novel, the reader never learns how the world ends, instead McCarthy focuses on his familiar theme of the human tendency toward violence; gratuitous slaughter beyond any sense of morality we might have. like No place for old peopleMcCarthy the way More suitable for adaptation than his earlier works. The narrative is simple and the language is clear, reflecting the vocabulary of his poor, rural, and world-weary protagonists. The difficulty in reading this novel lies primarily in how much senseless cruelty you can endure while still maintaining love for your family and faith in humanity as a whole.
Like all of McCarthy’s novels, the way Has a unique sense of rhythm. The lack of quotation marks means you have to pay close attention to word choice while getting caught up in the musicality of the back-and-forth exchange to understand who is speaking. There are moments where McCarthy’s characters feel indistinguishable as they parrot similar thoughts and questions. This is an element that is unlikely to exist in a movie or audiobook. The task of interpreting and understanding who is speaking and how they present themselves to you is part of the experience. Lacenet does an admirable job of experimenting with a similar sense of rhythm through typefaces. Rather than relying on the ambiguity of the speaker, he uses short, direct sentences, which he visualizes as a series of stacked balloons.
Overheard begins the story with images of wasteland and smoke, which slowly form the image of our protagonist. Humanity is formed from the ruins of a destroyed world, stained with thick black shadows and crude lines that blur the line between man and the decaying remnants of another civilization. These images set the tone of the book and pay homage to how McCarthy fully utilized the medium of comics to reveal his world to readers.
Rather than copy-pasting McCarthy’s dialogue, “The Web” chooses to continue an extended sequence with no dialogue and absolutely no narration. Each page is broken down into large panels, which give us the width and scope of the terrain the characters are traveling on, before breaking down into smaller staccato panels. These layouts highlight the nuances of our characters’ actions and contrast with their insignificance in the challenges they face.
At its core, the way It’s about the breakdown of the social contract, and how far you can go to uphold your obligations to your family while hypocritically abandoning your neighbors. Characters often discuss the idea of being a good person, are we good or bad? the way has much in common with bloodline. One was at the forefront when American identity was born, and the other was at the other end after it collapsed. Cowboys, ranchers, and cattle scalpers will become the mythical “good guys” the way Then cling to meaning. Both the way and bloodline Attempts to find meaning are futile when the very act of finding meaning is inseparable from violence and dehumanization.
Larcenet strives to grapple with these distinctions by painstakingly humanizing everyone we encounter on the highway, be it good or bad, or society or chaos. Every poor, hungry, begging soul is no different from our personality. The question of good and bad people becomes blurred because of how we harm others while standing up for ourselves, and how quickly these things can shift when our moral sentiments have no basis in social form.
Burglar’s greatest achievement here is his ability to linger on moments of humanity in everyday life without the need for dialogue to supplement them.
Sequences of sharing food or falling asleep feel all the more haunting when they’re surrounded by images of a desolate world and aware of what our characters are doing in the name of survival. These opportunities to separate our characters into individual paneled cells are a welcome enhancement to the story, something that’s only possible in the comics. If McCarthy’s prose aims to blur the lines between society and humanity, good and bad, and people, then the panels of “Stealing the Internet” force readers to overcome the barriers and gaps between panels to discover what is otherwise lacking. human nature. Every interrupted moment, every interrupted sequence, is an opportunity for us to feel alone again and to search, mostly in vain, for some semblance of connection along this lonely road.
Larcenet joins the Coen brothers as a group of individuals with a reputation for being able to translate McCarthy’s values beyond the original medium. Lacenet said the way It is an important companion to the novel and an extension of his own work. The care and thought put into the lettering and panels adds a new dimension to the thematic work, and uses the language of comics to correctly translate rather than simply repeat the novel’s literary meaning. For fans of McCarthy, Larcenet or newcomers, this is a must buy.
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