ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

about the act of reading the novel. 45 Rowson uses visual digressions, self-reflexivity, and
critical engagement to channel the Shandean spirit. Rowson stays true to Sterne by
denying the genre’s conventions.
The conventions of the comic book have developed since the eighteenth century.
Like the novel’s earliest reputation as a “low form of literature” (Bowen 12), the comic
book has struggled to overcome its designation as juvenile, smutty, and even corruptible
medium, for much of its popular history.Since its acceptance as a “literary form”in the
1930s, the comic book has been considered “suspect by mainstream culture” (Weiner
25). 46 Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) claimed that reading comic
books influenced negative social behaviour on its young readers, as its primary audience
was an adolescent one. 47 While his findings were alarmist, comics were still “dismissed as
cheap entertainment for kids” (Eisener ix). And
some comics rightfully deserved this kind of
criticism. The Classics Illustrated enterprise,
with almost 250 titles, presents young readers
with illustrated versions of canonical literature,
but the storyline, complexity, and context of the
originals are diluted in the process of
adaptation. 48 The Classics Illustrated: Gulliver’s
Travels, for instance, which was released in
1943, whittles down Jonathan Swift’s critical
satire to fifty illustrated pages of a cutesy hero-
adventure narrative (Figure 2). The literary value
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Figure 2.