Response to Poetry Comics

"My book is based on the idea that the poem-cartoon combination is quite natural. It evolves from the close relationship that words and pictures have always had. Poetry and cartoonery are both art forms. Together, they can only enrich each other." (Dave Morice, "preface," Poetry Comics)

Poetry Comics is an interesting study on the combination of poetry and cartoonery. The poems are popular ones, but they vary greatly. The comics themselves vary greatly in character and also in the way that they relate or react to the original poems.

Some comics are close reflections of the poems. Morice's comic of "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll (pg. 86) reflects the whimsy and comic nature of the original poem. Others reframe the poem by juxtaposing the text against something unexpected, as in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18," where unusual monsters utter the lines of the sonnet while somehow embodying them. (pg. 1)

Still others work poems into narrative, as in Ben Johnson's "Song: To Celia," (pg. 21) where the poem becomes dialogue and transforms a single speaker into a few speakers. This transforms the poem entirely. Morice goes further with Emily Dickinson's "Modern Poetry Romance." (pg. 82) by taking excerpts from various poems and using them to create a narrative.

Another example of this collage of ideas appears as T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which portraits of Prufrock even make a tongue-in-cheek cameo, particularly when he peeks over the building and says "That is not what I meant at all." (pg. 99) This seems like a recognition of an intentional misinterpretation of the poem--and it works well.

In this way, the comics are treated as reactions to the poems, and thus stand alone as individual works of art that allude to the poems, but do not necessarily try to imitate or lean on the poems themselves.

Morice describes ways in which a comic might relate to a poem or poems on page117: "In moving from poem to cartoon, you take a given group of words and create a visual environment around them. This change automatically affects the tone of the poem. The results can be illustrational, satirical, critical, or surreal. Bringing the two art forms together can help you to understand how each one works, and how they can work together."