Great Expectations

CLASSICAL COMICS has published another great adaptation of Charles Dickens' work, in the hefty shape and form of Great Expectations.

Great Expectations is the tale of Pip, orphaned as a child and brought up under her sufferance by his elder sister, and her hard-pressed husband Joe Gargery.

Two seemingly unrelated events happen to young Pip that affect his future.

First, by default the way I've always read it, he saves Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict.

Then, secondly, he is told to make regular visits to the eccentric old spinster that is Miss Havisham, and there entertain her adopted daughter, the considerably cruel Estella.

As Pip matures he finds he has a mysterious benefactor who will fund him to make something of himself.

He believes this to be Miss Havisham, under the pretext that he will become worthy of one day marrying Estella, whom despite her rudeness to him he became besotted with.

This is proved to be a falsehood, and from my earlier comments I'm sure you've realised, or already knew, that Magwitch is behind Pips good fortune. I'm hardly giving the game away here. If you've not read the book already, you've surely seen the excellent old black and white film adaptation starring a young Sir John Mills, or will end up watching a new serial version on TV someday.

It doesn't really matter because it's pretty well sign-posted that that's going to be the case. It's the connivances in between that make this turn into a humdinger of a plot that needs unravelling, plus a bunch of characters so well defined, mostly unlikely for one reason or another, though usually snobbery, that make this an engrossing read. Dickens, the master of words literally makes them leap off the page.

So when a story is so well defined in one medium, why convert it to another? To reach a different audience. To sit back in watch a film can be purely visual, your mind taking more of a back seat, than the hardier task of reading an thinking the words out in one's mind too. Now with the comics medium, one still has to read (albeit that Classical Comics have gone to the expense of putting out two version of this, one the full transcript of the book, another shortened for a modern faster-paced read) the eyes can also take in the visuals supplied to carry, convey and illuminate the story.

That's a pretty basic rough and ready explanation I know, and there are several reasons why, and possibly quite a few why one might not want to bother, but the fact remains that this is another great Dickens adaptation from this award-winning British company.

With a script adaptation by Jen Green, one can appreciate the editing work required by her when comparing the full version to the shorter one. Whether or not the pacing of the book is down to her is hard to gauge, as this may have been John Stokes' doing.

I have to admit a great and embarrassing fact in that I know far too little about John Stokes' work as an artist.

Jon Haward who's done a few books for Classical Comics himself has been raving about the man for years, and I think recommended him for this book. An awful lot of the work Jon (without the H) pencilled for Panini UK and the likes has been inked by John (the one with the H) but you can only see so much of a man's style over an 11 page Spider-Man story.

Stokes' art is thought highly of by British superhero fans for him working on a version of The Black Knight in Marvel UK anthologies, but he'd been drawing strips for many Fleetway/IPC weeklies way before that. Last year I was sat in the Briar Rose pub up Bennetts Hill when someone got out a stack of a short-lived seventies comic called Vulcan. It reprinted adventure strips from the sixties, mostly in colour. People were talking about how rare some of the issues were, something to do with certain issues being only distributed in Scotland, then numbering changes, and how the reprints had pages added... It was all quite beyond me, but I remember thinking "I am so impressed by you right now" about cartoonist Lew Stringer as he pointed out pages that the likes of John Stokes had added anonymously, ghosting others' styles to fit the stories.

So I had pretty much got the impression that John Stokes was a hard-working industry type, always there, filling in and helping meet deadlines for publishers, rather than an industry heavyweight. Actually, that's the kind of person I generally prefer. But while he may never have been a big name compared to the like of your Dan Dare artists, he certainly more than delivered the goods in his own right over the years.

As I leafed through, then delighted in the many pages of Great Expectations, my mind was flooded with countless comic strips that I had read, enjoyed, and presumed to have forgotten about in a lot of cases, as a child that had so obviously been drawn by the diligent hand of John Stokes.

Stokes is an comic book artist of the British old school sort. He doesn't cheat. All that you need to establish a setting is present; then he focuses on the lead players. Characteristically his figures tend to be on the slim side, which adds to the whimsy of their movements: few people are shaped ideally and there is a certain degree of clumsiness in our mannerisms that he captures to good effect adding to the emotional range of the story.

Thus far, I love what Classical Comics are doing with their Dickens adaptations more so than their Shakespeare books, though that's possibly down to my preference of author over playwright. That the company is putting out books drawn by senior master craftsmen of the comics form like John Stokes and John M Burns is also a privileged delight.

Old school does not have to mean old fashioned, it more often means that they've learnt their skills properly, over time, and as evidenced by these kinds of books are still up to the challenge of the modern world. Comic book artists, and indeed writers, take note. Bank directors and currently elected politicians, it would be nice if you too looked to the great and the good of the past to influence your modern practices to help get this country back on its feet... But of course, that's just a personal view!

The important thing is you can purchase Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Jen Green and John Stokes at all good bookshops and comics speciality stores, and direct from Classical Comics by visiting: www.classicalcomics.com