Friday, April 6, 2018

Beowulf in Comics

I've begun a project collecting representations of Beowulf in comic format as a resource for teaching the text. If you have any suggestions please contact me at MedievalinPopularCulture@gmail.com (I'm in that account more often than the Medieval Comics Project one). I'm also looking for works of scholarship (or reviews and/or interviews) on these adaptations and will eventually add my findings to the blog.

One interesting text, I have discovered so far is a story in Jumbo Comics No. 50 (Apr. 1943). It looks to be the first adaptation of the work into American comics. The story is sort of a version of the Connecticut Yankee narrative with a hot-headed, twentieth-century young man trying to one-up Beowulf with varied results. I am hoping to present on the comic this fall at our MAPACA roundtable, and I include here the second page of the story where the youth faces Grendel for the first time. I've also added an image of Beowulf's arrival at Heorot to the main page of the blog.

Michael Torregrosa
Founder and Blog Editor