For the last four days of Year Four, I'll be back to blogging with this lovely rendition of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece. I've decided it's time I start blogging again. The routine is good for my health, and I miss writing about these wondrous and wacky comics. At some point I'll post a list of what I've read during my break, for the completists out there!
Year Four will kick off with a return to The Doom Patrol, both because I kicked off this year with them, and because their new television series is, for at least one episode, a fucking triumph. But there certainly never could have been a Doom Patrol of any kind without this weird little tale of a child's hallucinatory adventure through dreams.
Of course, the first thing I noticed is that Alice's dress is blue. When I taught the book at the U of C, I always asked the class what colour Alice's dress was. Invariably, the answer was blue. There is, however, no mention of colour anywhere in the original text. Blue, I'm afraid, comes from the Disneyfication of our society. I've no doubt that blue was a popular colour for little girls of the time, but surely there were others.
Anyway, that aside, this is a lovely adaptation, just different enough from previous iterations that it really does add something to the story. In a lot of ways, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland really is an anime/manga waiting to happen. The non-sequiturs, randomly talking animals, sudden and fantastic shifts in perspective (I'm looking at you, Kill La Kill) - all hallmarks of manga. Érica Awano's manga-esque (she's Japanese-Brazilian, so her art is a cool hybrid) style brings to Alice a kinetic energy that the book actually sort of lacks. Rather than a tale told lazily while floating down a river (as the original was composed), this is a sitting on Saturday morning with a bowl of sugary cereal watching cartoons version. And it's beautiful.
Alice holds a dear place in my heart. The first time I ever really delved into literature the way that is not second nature to me was in an OAC English Literature course in my last year of high school. I wrote a paper contrasting Alice and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as journeys into the psyche. A bit obvious, I know, but not bad for a 17-year old to pull off. But Alice has also stuck with me for its embrace of chaos, of weirdness, of the idea that truth doesn't only lie in cold, hard facts, but in the vast, wild ranges of the imagination too. Which, really, is also a nice lead in to the Doom Patrol.
More to come...
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