Heart of Darkness

August 1, 2019

A lifelong fascination with the places on the globe left unexplored leads Charles Marlow to take a job working for an ivory trading firm and setting out on a journey through Africa. While traveling aboard a steamship along the Congo River, Marlow witnesses the barbarity with which his fellow Europeans treat the natives they have subjugated and becomes increasingly obsessed with an ivory trader named Kurtz, who is either idolized as a genius or hated by seemingly everyone he encounters. Acclaimed cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque) approaches this adaptation with a mixture of respect for Conrad as a novelist and a keen sensitivity to postcolonial criticism of the text, frequently combining Conrad's own language with visuals that confront or subvert the author's colonialist perspective without losing any of the haunting power of the original. VERDICT Incredibly, Kuper has created a faithful adaptation likely to appeal to both devotees and detractors of the source material, which just might cause members of either camp to view the text in a new light. [Previewed in Ingrid Bohnenkamp's Graphic Novel Spotlight, "Mass Appeal," LJ 6/19.]

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 19, 2019
Conrad’s gnarled novella’s shifting and overloaded allegories are distilled down quite neatly in this haunting graphic adaptation by Kuper (Kafkaesque). The story is unchanged, rearing out like a modern-day myth told one night by a sailor, Marlow, to his crewmates. Marlow secured a job with a trading company hunting for ivory deep in an unnamed country and, on a doomed boat manned by tragically maltreated African cannibals and villainously buffoonish Europeans, he follows the river resembling “a snake uncoiled” deep into the wilderness, looking to save the “sick” ivory hunter Kurtz. Kurtz’s time in the jungle has transformed him into a crazed warlord casting a cult-leader spell (“his intelligence was perfectly clear, but his soul had gone mad”). Kuper’s angled figures are drawn with the kind of feverish intensity befitting the tale’s clamorous climactic utterance of “the horror, the horror.” He keeps Conrad’s original plot intact, but in order to “illuminate its heart” (per his extensive introduction, which includes samples of process pages), Kuper spirals out from Conrad’s point of view to view the colonial slaughter from its victims’ perspective. This respectful adaptation proves why readers continue to return to trace Marlow’s route down the river and puzzle over the relevance of its message.

September 1, 2019
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad's literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation. As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once "one of the dark places of the earth," referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow's trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a "soul [that] had gone mad" for their efforts), explaining that "by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad's text." There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it's hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper's work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad's language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes. Gorgeous and troubling.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.