Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s love of comics has been discussed on this blog before. Equally interesting is the flip-side, the love cartoonists have for Nabokov. Here are a few examples:<\/p>\n
1. Jay Lynch interview, Comics Journal<\/em> #114:<\/p>\n Lynch: Sure. Sometimes, I think that Nard N\u2019 Pat<\/em> is pretty much derived from James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> and that Phoebe<\/span> is nothing more than improvisations that spin off from Nabokov\u2019s Ada<\/em>.<\/p>\n Lait: How many times have you read Ada<\/em>?<\/p>\n Lynch: Eight or nine. Jackie has known me for years, so he knows that I think Nabokov\u2019s Ada<\/em> is the greatest, most complex piece of fiction ever written. Once I did a thing for RAW<\/em> called “The Goodnight Kids.” It\u2019s full of Ada<\/span> references. I figured if one person deciphered that, I\u2019d be fulfilled.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Goodnight Kids\u201d can be found in Raw<\/em> vol. 1, #5 (1983).<\/p>\n 2. Dan Clowes interview, Comics Journal<\/em> #233, discussing his graphic novel David Boring<\/em>:<\/p>\n Clowes: I was certainly inspired by Pale Fire<\/em>, I think, with his undependable narrator, or maybe he is a dependable narrator, it\u2019s hard to say. The way he sort of references this text, that being the old comic book, and sort of re-imagines it into what he wants it to be.<\/p>\n When I was reading Pale Fire<\/em>, I remember the thing I really responded to was the idea that I had, as a kid, read comics that my brother had left lying around, and I had tried to take from them some unconscious message that wasn\u2019t necessarily there. I thought that was such a great thing in Pale Fire<\/em> how this unreliable critic who\u2019s sort of mis-analyzing this whole epic poem that John Shade has written, is actually creating this whole new work of art that\u2019s possibly even superior to this great poem itself.<\/p>\n Clowes also included a Nabokov joke in Eightball<\/span> #17: a gag cartoon titled “The Lepidopterist.” David Boring<\/em> is full of allusions to Nabokov. Perhaps the most subtle is a statement made by the hero to his lover, “You’re the original of Wanda.” (p. 92.) Nabokov’s last, unfinished book (which will finally be published this fall) is titled The Original of Laura<\/em>.<\/p>\n 3. Chris Ware interview, Comics Journal<\/em> #200:<\/p>\n Ware: There is a segment in Lolita <\/em>where Humbert Humbert is trying to describe the accumulative effect of a number of events going on in his visual field as he comes upon an accident scene in his front yard. He has to go through three or four paragraphs to describe what\u2019s happening, and he excuses himself and the limits of his medium for its inherent lack of simultaneity. This is, of course, something you could presumably do in a comic strip, though it wouldn\u2019t be nearly as funny.<\/p>\n 4. In his novel Laughter in the Dark<\/em>, Nabokov described a fictional animated character named \u201cCheapy the Guinea Pig.\u201d In the anthology Zero Zero<\/em>, issue #27, Al Columbia did a one-page strip imagining what Cheapy looked like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s love of comics has been discussed on this blog before. Equally interesting is the flip-side, the love cartoonists have for Nabokov. Here are a few examples: 1. Jay Lynch interview, Comics Journal #114: Lynch: Sure. Sometimes, I think that Nard N\u2019 Pat is pretty much derived from James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses and that Phoebe is nothing more than improvisations that spin off from Nabokov\u2019s Ada. Lait: How many times […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[28,238,273,299,629,1354],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-a-columbia","tag-ware","tag-comics-vs-literature","tag-clowes","tag-j-lynch","tag-nabokov"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}