CULTURE

T. S. Eliot’s Classic Modernist Poem The Waste Land Gets Adapted into Comic-Book Form


The phrase “April is the cru­elest month” was first print­ed more than 100 years ago, and it’s been in com­mon cir­cu­la­tion almost as long. One can eas­i­ly know it with­out hav­ing the faintest idea of its source, let alone its mean­ing. This is not, of course, to call T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land an obscure work. Despite hav­ing met with a deri­sive, even hos­tile ini­tial recep­tion, it went on to draw acclaim as one of the cen­tral Eng­lish-lan­guage poems of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, to say noth­ing of its sta­tus as an achieve­ment with­in the mod­ernist move­ment. But how, here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, to read it afresh?

One new avenue to approach The Waste Land is this com­ic-book adap­ta­tion by Julian Peters, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his graph­ic ren­di­tions of oth­er such poems as Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, W. B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old,” and Eliot’s own “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

It’s an adap­ta­tion, to be pre­cise, of the first of The Waste Land’s five sec­tions, “The Bur­ial of the Dead,” which opens on a First World War bat­tle­field — at least in Peters’ adap­ta­tion, which puts the first line “April is the cru­elest month” into the con­text of night­mar­ish imagery of blood­shed and death — and ends in a worka­day Lon­don likened to Dan­te’s hell.

The Waste Land presents a tempt­ing but daunt­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to an illus­tra­tor, filled as it is with vivid evo­ca­tions of place and appear­ances by intrigu­ing char­ac­ters (includ­ing, in this sec­tion, “Madame Sosostris, famous clair­voy­ante”), and char­ac­ter­ized as it is by exten­sive lit­er­ary quo­ta­tion and sud­den shifts of con­text. But Peters has made a bold start of it, and any­one who reads his adap­ta­tion of “The Bur­ial of the Dead” will be wait­ing for his adap­ta­tions of “A Game of Chess” through “What the Thun­der Said.” Though much-scru­ti­nized over the past cen­tu­ry, Eliot’s mod­ernist mas­ter­piece (hear Eliot read it here) still tends to con­found first-time read­ers. To them, I always advise con­sid­er­ing poet­ry a visu­al medi­um, an idea whose pos­si­bil­i­ties Peters con­tin­ues to explore on a much more lit­er­al lev­el. Explore it here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read the Entire Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem Annabel Lee

W. B. Yeats’ Poem “When You Are Old” Adapt­ed into a Japan­ese Man­ga Com­ic

T. S. Eliot Illus­trates His Let­ters and Draws a Cov­er for Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats

T. S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “TheLovee Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.





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