Comics and adaptations: Fun Home and Giant Days

[roadrunnertwice]

Alison Bechdel — Fun Home (comics, re-read, adaptation)

Oct 13

The Portland Armory was showing a production of Fun Home: The Musical, and Ruth's aunt was involved in some kind of related fundraising or profile-raising event for the Portland Lesbian Choir (they were originally going to sing before the show, but that ended up not happening), so... we went to see it!

It was good. Well, for me and for a musical, that still means it was more interesting than it was enjoyable, per se — musicals aren't exactly my favorite genre. (Like with VNs, I find them somehow inherently suspect, but keep prodding at them because I can still sense something interesting there, even if they're mostly talking past me.)

Anyway, I think it was a good adaptation. When they first announced it was happening, years ago, I was like "you read THAT comic and decided it would make a good WHAT?" But it was an adaptation of the events rather than of the comic, which I think showed some wisdom and restraint vis a vis the capabilities of media that are in many ways opposites.

Of course, being a reinterpretation of events means it wasn't the same story (story being the construction of meaning from mere dumb events), and medium is very relevant to that. In main, Fun Home is a comic about the uncertainty of memory and knowledge and emotion, and those are things that the Broadway musical as a format has no tools to represent. In fact, I'd say that certainty is the fundamental building block for anything else represented on Broadway. Fun Home is reticent and evasive, and you can't reticently belt out a showstopper, I mean Jesus, come on.

So taking that into account and being sensitive of medium (as best I can), here's the things that are still odd to me from (this production of) the musical.

• Bruce Bechdel's character had a really different affect from his depiction in the comic. He was played with this flustered, jocular, awkward doofiness. Comic Bruce alternated between dour and wry (at least when he wasn't raging and throwing things), and it was shocking every time the facade broke and you could see the turmoil underneath.

  This difference, I think, wasn't attributable to medium, and I wasn't a fan.

• Also, the actor playing "Medium Alison" seemed to be taking Willow from Buffy as her model, which, ngl, I found baffling. Especially when "Adult Alison" nailed the "real" (autobiographical) Bechdel dead fuckin' center (and "Small Alison" was pretty solid too).

• Bruce's final aria is the one problem with the play that I can't really forgive.

  I can see why they put it there; the Broadway form says that's what you have to do. And most of what I could say about it is just a rehash of what I was saying above about certainty and uncertainty. But this is the one part of the story where I think imposing certainty on an uncertain event is a genuine moral betrayal, not just a conflict between aesthetics. It would have still been a musical if they'd left that one hole, and I believe it would have been a better one.

• I was kind of surprised at how un-visual the show was. The comic has a bunch of recurring motifs that I was expecting to see carry over in some form; in particular, I'm thinking of the mock-heroic silhouettes of her father at work on the house, which contrasted with or reinforced his various other faces. (If you've got the book in front of you, look in the first chapter for him putting up the exterior molding or levering flagstones into place.) But no, it was pretty straight-ahead stage-y.

  Is this in conflict with what I was saying above about how an "adaptation of the comic" would have been impossible? I don't think so. Certainly the musical was trading on its association with the comic; they make multiple references to Bechdel's career as a cartoonist, and the set design included some views of the house in dangling frames reminiscent of comic panels, so while the show wasn't a translation of the comic, it did try to stay in partial touch with a certain comicky aesthetic.

  If you've read your Scott McCloud, you know that one of comics's biggest strengths is its control over the subjective speed of time passing, with panel size (and visual density per panel) being one of the most flexible implements of control. Fun Home frequently uses large striking or mysterious images to stop time in its tracks entirely, especially images of artifacts (photographs, letters, hardware).

  Musicals have their own implements of time control: lighting, stage movement, and most importantly the showstopper. But I was expecting a musical based on a comic to try a hybrid method of control with increased use of semi-static visual tableaux, and I didn't really see it. The main thing they used to pull back out of the stream of memory was Adult Alison's interjections from the side of the stage, with accompanying lighting changes.

  Anyway, it all worked fine, it's just that I saw some skipped opportunities for something really interesting, and I'm curious if maybe they tried that and it didn't work so well, or what.

OH RIGHT, hold up, this is the book review post, isn't it. Well, I re-read the comic too, and finished it shortly after we saw the show. It had been about ten years since I'd read it, and while I'd forgotten a lot of specifics (all the Proust and Fitzgerald parallels), the feel of it and the spiral-shaped narrative structure were exactly as I remembered them. Again thinking about form and adaptation: in the comic, you see Bruce's death (or moments adjacent to it) many times — approach the brink, pull back at the last second, circle around for another pass; that's basically the shape of the book. Fuckin' imagine doing THAT on Broadway, the audience would revolt. (That's what I was picturing when I first heard they were adapting it.)

Ruth's mom (not a comics reader) is interested in reading it now, and I'll be interested to hear what she thinks.

John Alison et al. — Giant Days, vols 2 & 3 (comics)

Sep 21

Y'know, I might not continue reading this series. I'm glad it seems to have gotten popular, though; Alison has always deserved a bigger readership, and his co-creators on this project (Sarin, Treiman, Cogar) are all great.

I've finally figured out what this comic reminds me of. About fifteen years ago, in the webcomic Paleozoic, one of the most dominant subgenres (possibly even above bullshit gamer strips) was the college dorm-mates comedy/drama, with or without paranormal hijinks. (It made sense: in 2002, who had the most reliable access to expensively fast internet and the highest inclination to avoid their work and fuck around on the web? Undergrads at 4-year residential colleges. That's your early webcomics readership, and a significant chunk of the authorship too. And even ignoring that, a college dorm is just a very natural fit for a sitcom.)

Giant Days is like a much slicker and smarter throwback to those strips, very close to the perfect, Platonic form they were all chasing.

But I was part of that early webstrip audience — I ate that subgenre up, then kind of got it all out of my system and stopped craving that flavor. That's also why I haven't looked into Dumbing of Age, even though I've enjoyed Willis' stuff a lot over the years and by all accounts it's his best work.

Anyway, this is a very good comic, and I recommend it to anyone who isn't in perma-burnout on college roommate dramedy.