Anthony Trollope

The method of analysis of communications registers outlined by linguists Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad (2009), begins with the identification of what they term the ‘situational characteristics’ of a register. These characteristics are as much social as material. They claim that before a register can be identified or expressive content considered, the analyst must undertake a sociology of the text. Following Biber and Conrad, this chapter will describe ways in which readers’ expectations of the content of comics, or comics’ genres, are an underlying characteristic of the ‘situation’ of comics as a register. It will propose that, unlike other registers, the misapprehension of the comics register as a genre (Wolk 2007) constitutes an ongoing process of adaptation in which the influence of prior knowledge destabilises rather than stabilises the register (Sanders 2005, Hutcheon 2006).
The comics register allows and disallows sets of specific expressions, which are quite different from, although affected by, the sets of expressions allowed and disallowed by comics genres (Barker 1989). The overlaps between register and genres (or between the ‘situational characteristics’ and the expectation of content), engender adaptation, parody, appropriation and non-sequiturs.
This chapter will the analyse the forthcoming adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel ‘John Caldigate’ (1878) as a new comic book by Simon Grennan. Key to this particular process of adaptation is the instrumental curation, adoption and manipulation of styles of drawing that are generic, where genre constitutes a material index of particular historic times though the use of past technologies, foe example, or the embodiment of specific subjectivities in the adoption of sets of visual devices identified with other or past comics artists
In the context of a discussion of the role of drawing style, the chapter will explore the notion that adaptations are self-conscious in their employment of similarities across formal boundaries of both register (between the forms of text fictions and narrative drawing, for example) and genres (or ‘horizons of expectation’ as George Herbert Mead put it [1967]): in other words, that adaptations always embody “…an overt and defining relationship to prior texts.” (Hutcheon 2006:03).
In this sense, the new comic’s plot, drawing styles, methods of production and situations of reading will constitute a historiography of ‘John Caligate,’ wherein both the novel and the adaptation are approached as the embodiment of relative historic moments. The chapter will interrogate two of the underlying assumptions of this approach: first, that it is possible to produce a new comic that is meaningful to a contemporary reader as Trollope’s novel was meaningful to readers of his time and, second, that historiography involves disruptions of genre that can in themselves reveal the ‘situational characteristics’ of register.
The new comic’s form will be employed to comment on history. Considered as an example of the comics register, this will be a comic with ulterior motives. The chapter will outline this critical framework for the adaptation of ‘John Caldigate’ in order to demonstrate the productive instability of the comics register itself (Decter 2007): that is, the register’s availability to adaptation.