ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

II. Is the Message
A certain amount of repetition is necessary in adaptations. For Bolter and Grusin,
all media are intermedial and multimodal (55). By intermediality, Bolter and Grusin
mean that in every form of media, several other forms and qualities of media are
incorporated into the new form, while multimodality accounts for the various ways in
which the media is constructed and how the story is retold. Rowson’s Tristram Shandy
uses various modes to adapt and recreate the novel, which places his adaptation outside
of typical comic book conventions, and which gives his version its Shandean
‘experimental’ qualities. 64 Indeed, McCloud notes that every medium “begins its life by
imitating its predecessors” (McCloud 151); like Bolter and Grusin’s concept, one could
say that all media is adaptation, either of earlier media
forms or particular ideas within media. Rowson
incorporates and imitates media forms in the graphic
novel to gesture toward this aspect of remediation and the
Shandean method of visual and textual unification.
So, how does Rowson’s adaptation incorporate
various media? Comic books are, by nature, intermedial
and multimodal in the use of both text and image to
convey information. At times, Rowson uses Sterne’s text
to guide the reader’s impression and understanding of the
image “interdependent[ly]” (McCloud 155). At other
times, the text relates directly to the image or panel-scene,
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Figure 8. Parson Yorick.