ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

(Weiner 17). Critics began to value the intermediality and interactivity of comics by
understanding how comics work, and how comic adaptations can renew the original text
through interpretation and creation. With the mandate to “support experiments using the
comic book format” (Weiner 47), Tundra Publishing released Scott McCloud’s
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art in 1993, which features a cartoon McCloud
exegetically moving through panels of illustrated comic book theory. Joyce Goggin
observes that McCloud “venture[s] his own theory of comics” (11) with arguments that,
while contested by scholars and critics, continue to supply the terminology for critical
discussion.
Understanding Comics is a comic book about comic books. McCloud first defines
“comics” as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to
convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 9).
This distinction, “deliberate sequence,” is an important one; Rowson illustrates Tristram
Shandy out of sequence. In place of Sterne’s narrative digressions, Rowson uses visual
digressions: the panels are crowded, non-uniform, and filled with visual icons that
represent elements of the text.Sequence is a major feature and convention of graphic
novels, but Rowson challenges the construction of the visual text; in one panel, we are in
the bowling green, for example, and in another we are in a void. As in Tristram Shandy,
the notion of sequence is mocked; Rowson uses illustrated signposts throughout the
panels that ‘direct’ the reader’s sense of narrative direction. These signposts, however,
marked, “Ye Olde Narrative,” point in the wrong direction or to nowhere at all. 52 At
times, too, the words “narrative” scroll around frames. And, while the history of visual art
and visual narrative ranges from classical frescoes to illuminated manuscripts, the visual
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