ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

McCloud writes that in comics, “art approaches language” (McCloud 195), and
there are two particular instances in the graphic novel that reveal the extent to which
Rowson remediates and even recreates Tristram Shandy with such visual language. At
the end of Volume 6, just after we see Tristram's foreskin fenestration, Rowson makes a
jump to Volume 7 (“what happened to the rest of volumes 5 & 6?!!”), and yet
(surprisingly) picks up the narrative at a moment when Tristram returns to describe the
reason for the window sash's falling. But, Volume 7 is a chapter noted for its subtext:
Tristram's/Sterne's “flight from death.” 73 Rather than illustrate the characters moving
through Europe in a metaphorical dash, Rowson shows Tristram obliviously narrating in
a white oblivion while Death creeps up behind him and taps him on the shoulder. When
Death finally “got [him] by the throat,” an allusion to Sterne's consumption that Rowson
indicates by drawing Death throttling Tristram's neck, Tristram knees Death in the groin
and takes off in a post-chaise (Figure 14), which concludes that volume. Especially here,
but also elsewhere, the text is signified by the image.
Figure 14. Tristram knees Death in the groin.
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