Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago (7 page)

Refining and defining what it meant to keep faith with the original was bounded by two kinds of considerations: specific, concrete problems idiosyncratic to
A Game of Thrones
on the one hand, and structural issues that rise from the act of moving between prose and graphic storytelling regardless of the underlying work on the other. I’ll give some examples of each.

The first of the idiosyncratic issues was the place A Song of Ice and Fire had achieved in the cultural moment. Our adaptation of
A Game of Thrones
wasn’t the first one that the books had inspired. Before our comic book project began, there had already been replica swords, sculptures, and enough art to fill several calendars, card and board games, and two volumes of
The Art of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire
. The popularity of the novels had also inspired a television series that was already casting. Which is to say,
A Game of Thrones
was already in the center of a body of artistic work that had spread well beyond the book itself. How we chose to play off those existing visions of the characters, places, and events had practical implications for more than just us.

There is an attraction to participating in a larger creative enterprise. If our Eddard Stark bore some resemblance to the actor cast in the television show, the image would gain something by the familiarity. Ted Naismith did brilliant versions of Winterfell and the Eyrie. John Picacio’s Eddard Stark, Jon Snow, and Daenerys Targaryen are wonderfully realized and compelling. These talented people have already created a bevy of first-class work. Why not build on what they’ve accomplished? The artistic argument against that strategy was that, in taking our lead from earlier artists, we would sacrifice something of our own originality and vision. By tying ourselves to what had come before, we would lose the opportunity to invent our own versions, maybe better, maybe not, but certainly more authentically our own. Neither was that the only consideration.

As much as I would like to think that artistic concerns are first and last in all things, the constraints on a project are rarely exclusively aesthetic. The property for which we had rights was, and is, the original novel. While it would be possible to get the permission from the previous artists who had created versions of Westeros, keeping track of the full catalog of A Song of Ice and Fire creations and integrating them into our version of the story could prove more awkward, time-consuming, and unwieldy than starting from scratch. There would necessarily be some family resemblances among the various incarnations of
A Game of Thrones
. We are, after all, interpreting the same source material and sometimes artists naturally reach for the same solutions to common problems. And there were some real problems. For example, Daenerys.

Daenerys Targaryen was the second issue that we faced, one specific to
A Game of Thrones
, and very thorny, both for us and for other adaptors. Her character arc in the book takes her from emotionally abused political pawn, through an arranged marriage that rightly lifts the ethical hackles of a contemporary readership, an overtly sexual coming-of-age, a pregnancy, and a miscarriage, to become a political leader and powerful force in her own right. Her sexual awakening and the relationship of her sexuality to power are central to her story, as are issues of consent, control, and fertility. At the beginning of the book, she is thirteen years old.

There is an argument that drawing the story as it is written would be
illegal
.

The PROTECT Act of 2003 prohibits “obscene visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct” where the term “obscene” is defined according to the Miller Test. That is, a work can be classed as obscene if it violates community standards, is patently offensive, and, as a whole, lacks literary or artistic value. Whether the comic would have met those standards would be for a court to determine, unless we did something that explicitly took into account the legal implications of moving from text to image. The television adaptation addressed this by casting an actress who was legally of age. The comic book has no actress, and so the images created of her don’t have an objective truth to use in their defense. The alternatives available were either to omit several of the most important character moments, change the age of the character to fit contemporary legal standards regardless of the violence that would do to the intent of the story, or remain utterly faithful to the original text and prepare for scandal, censure, and legal action.

The third issue that
A Game of Thrones
brought with it was that A Song of Ice and Fire is still in progress. In the previous adaptations I’ve done—of the novel
Fevre Dream
and the novella “The Skin Trade”—there has been a finalized story in print. By knowing the ending toward which the plot was progressing, it becomes possible to see how events were foreshadowed in the text, and how that could be recreated in images.
A Game of Thrones
, on the other hand, is the first book in a series that is expected to run seven volumes, the last three of which hadn’t been published when the first scripts were written for the graphic novel. A Song of Ice and Fire is also notable for its willingness to surprise and work against the expectations of the genre. Knowing which characters are important to the overall story—and even which ones will survive to the final volume—is almost impossible at this stage. When Robb Stark and Jon Snow find the direwolf pups, Eddard Stark’s full group is with them, something like eight or ten named characters. Drawing them all could be visually confusing and cluttered. But the fact that Theon Greyjoy was present may be important later on. What can be cut and what can’t simply isn’t obvious yet.

That’s not true for every project. There are certainly long-running comic book series that have succeeded brilliantly without a strict continuity or foreshadowing that began years ahead. I’m thinking of ongoing serial (even soap-operatic) titles such as
Batman
or
Spider-Man
. But A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t open-ended. It does have a conclusion it moves toward, and in fact, the last sentence of the last book is already decided. Adapting the story without having the full text to judge still allows approaches ranging from strict adherence to the source material, to a good faith “best guess” on the adaptor’s part, to gathering information from lengthy interviews with George. It’s even possible to imagine an adaptation in which the ending of the graphic novels isn’t the same as the ending of the books, the two versions diverging as they progress, each controlled by its own internal logic. At that point, though, what exactly the adaptor is preserving rightly comes into question.

So, in addition to the peculiar issues of
A Game of Thrones
, there are more general structural differences between prose and sequential art that constrain the boundaries of adaptation. These grow, for the most part, from the aural nature of written English.

The literal symbols of English writing are encodings of sound, not vision. When reading prose silently, the sensual experience most immediately and easily evoked is sound, and the sound most easily evoked is the spoken voice of the characters or the narrator. This makes dialogue one of the strengths of prose fiction.

Reading well-crafted dialogue is like eavesdropping. A few telling physical details and small actions are enough to let the reader create a full, complex, and satisfying experience of the scene; Viserys’s lilac eyes as he sniffs disdainfully at Dany’s gift of Dothraki clothing and Eddard testing Needle’s edge with his thumb during his talk with Arya happen within the context of longer conversations, and not every exchange includes details like these. Graphic novels, by contrast, require a full visual component, and the natural fit for two people having a conversation—a long series of pictures of the person or people talking—gets dull fast. Dialogue that crackles with life and vitality in prose gets tedious when it’s rendered as page after page filled with pictures of talking heads and staggered word balloons. In a project that relies on dialogue—and most novels rely on dialogue—reframing the action so that more of the information is given to the reader through images is a challenge, and it encourages the adaptor to reimagine the scenes in ways that simplify and condense conversations, while amplifying action and the images that take the place of physical description in prose, even when that means doing some violence to the story.

Narrative voice is also a serious and related structural issue in the translation between media. It also brings in the collaborative nature of the adaptation. In prose, the narrator is an additional and often unnamed character with an idiosyncratic voice and manner that sets the essential tone of the story and provides information to the reader. In transitioning to comic books, those two functions are split.

The basic feel of a comic book isn’t provided by the narrator’s imagined speaking voice but by the artist’s visual style. Whether we are to take a story—or even a scene within a story—seriously or lightly is signaled by the way in which it is drawn and the palate used in coloring it. This is very similar to the way that word choices and vocal rhythms of a narrator’s voice cue a reader how to interpret action in prose. Imagine, for example, Winterfell drawn as a Disney princess cartoon as opposed to the style of Ted Naismith. The way that the artist approaches the image
is
the mood of the piece and exists with its own set of constraints, including the skill and interests of the artist and the time pressure of production. While the scripter can specify that an image be more stylized or realistic and describe the effect that an image or scene should convey, the actual drawing has to rely on the skill and, more importantly, the judgment of the artist. The images, however carefully conceived by the person making the script, are the necessary subject of the person drawing the lines, and the choices made at the drawing table are as important as the ones made at the keyboard. The role of the narrative voice as a cue on how to approach the project is actually taken out of the writer’s hands. Even if the script gives lengthy, specific instructions to the artist in the best Alan Moore tradition, the artist will still interpret it and make decisions that sometimes differ from the script. But what the visual style can’t do that a prose narrator can is provide abstract information, like exposition.

Exposition is always a problem. How well an author manages exposition is one good litmus test for quality. By having an engaging narrative voice, a text can move away from the literal and concrete action in a scene—the cinematic aspects of the story—to give background information, history, or philosophical and thematic grounding.
A Game of Thrones
in particular features passages that cover the history of Westeros and the complex backstories of the characters engaged in conversation in the scenes. When Eddard and Robert descend to the crypt below Winterfell to visit Lyanna’s grave, for example, there’s a wealth of information in the text about how the three of them were related, how Brandon Stark and the Tullys fit in, and the history of the rebellion that put Robert on the throne. There is no graceful way to take that abstract information and present it in a purely visual form. The options are to reprint the prose exposition (either entirely or in summary) with some limited illustration, omit the exposition and lose the depth and background, or take the information that was presented in exposition and shoehorn it into the action of the story, often using dialogue, with all the attendant trouble that creates.

A third strictly technical issue is the pacing of the plot.
A Game of Thrones
is built in chapters of varying lengths with the dramatic high points and resting places coming where they fit organically within those units, both individually and combined as a full novel. Recasting the same tale as a series of four graphic novels requires that the dramatic high points fall evenly and the quarter, half, three-quarter, and end marks even to the specific page. Furthermore, since each of the graphic novels is a concatenation of six comic book issues, lesser concluding moments come in at regular and prescribed intervals, which may or may not coincide with the source material.

We had some freedom in shaping the project at the beginning, when the structure was being set. The decisions made at that juncture—how many issues of the comic book would there be, how many pages in each issue, how many issues would be gathered into each graphic novel, how many graphic novels would there be—affected every subsequent decision.
A Game of Thrones
could be condensed and simplified down viciously by omitting subplots, characters, and scenes, rewriting characters’ relationships and motivations. It could also be expanded out into an epic to rival the original
Akira
, with the art being given more territory to expand and the more visual scenes playing out over the course of pages rather than panels. Either approach could be good, but they couldn’t be equivalent, and how each of the other decisions played out would be impacted by the shape of the scaffold erected in those early meetings.

So with those specific issues as a kind of sampler, we can come back again to the central question: when adapting from prose to sequential art, what am I trying to preserve and what am I willing to sacrifice?

It would be great if all the issues militated for one answer, but in practice, any one concern can find another that seems to oppose it. If I remain faithful to the original story, I face the problem of how to preserve the exposition, the dialogue, and the age of the younger characters. If I let the original story fall by the wayside and reimagine Westeros—adding new characters and plotlines or recreating ones that already exist—I have to confront the unfinished nature of the original and the expectations from the reader based on the novel and the other adaptations.