An owl, an ant and Albert Camus walk into a book...
Whenever I got my hands on a copy of Mad Magazine, there were a couple of regular features that I always looked forward to; both were wordless. The first was Spy vs Spy by Antonio Prohías, the other Sergio Aragonés’ Drawn-Out Dramas.
Spy vs Spy was a spoof of Cold War ideologies, in which the two spies, white and black, tried to outwit one another. Each battle was waged over a full-page of the magazine.
The Drawn-Out Dramas, on the other hand, lived in the margins of Mad - literally. Each little drama was tucked away in the white space and corners surrounding the main comics, often easy to miss, but a delight when discovered. They were what we in Louisiana call lagniappe - a little something extra for nothing.
When we decided to create the graphic version of Dead Man Walking, one of the key questions I faced as scriptwriter was “How do we tell a story of the 1980s, one that is full of observations and statistics about the justice system, and make it resonate with a 21st century audience?”
Reverberations from those old Drawn-Out Dramas provided the answer: we could use the margins, the spaces surrounding the illustrated panels, to introduce a character to provide context without tripping up Sister Helen’s narrative. And thus was born…
The Owracle
The Owracle provides what we call “future echoes”. It knows the story’s future - our present - and thus it is in a position to provide current context and updated data. Here’s one example where the Owracle springs into action…
Since the time of the Supreme Court death penalty cases that Sister Helen cited in the original Dead Man Walking, there have been many subsequent cases which have upended those earlier decisions or changed the course of death penalty jurisprudence. The 21st century, in particular, has seen an increasingly conservative court take the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and redefine, warp and mangle it beyond recognition.
To help us navigate these changes and bring us up to date, the Owracle acts as our guide, leading us from the early history of Eighth Amendment decisions to the present; from Wilkerson v. Utah (1879) and In re Kemmler (1890) all the way through Baze v. Rees (2008), Glossip v. Gross (2015) and Bucklew v. Precythe (2019).
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is in a constant state of flux, reflecting the ideological hues of those currently occupying the bench. It would be a disservice to Sister Helen’s story to render it today using fossilized information about the justice system. Thus, our far-seeing owl. Once the Owracle made its appearance, we decided it should have some company. Enter…
The Ant
The Ant, dubbed Pissant by Sister Helen, is a sassy little critter who’s role it is to add the occasional sardonic comment or to ask Owracle for understanding when the ways of the Supreme Court seem to defy mortal comprehension. Both Owracle and Pissant appear in a variety of guises throughout the book. And then there’s…
Albert Camus
Camus is the only one of the three marginal characters who appeared in the original Dead Man Walking.
Born in 1913 in Colonial Algeria, Albert Camus wore many caps, including those of writer and dramatist, journalist, philosopher, and political activist. His writing career was capped when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second youngest person to receive the award. (Rudyard Kipling was a whippersnapper of 41 when he received his Nobel in 1907.)
As a writer, Camus was perhaps best known for his novels The Rebel (L’Homme révolté), The Plague (La Peste) and The Stranger (L’Étranger). But it was a collection of shorter pieces which he himself selected and which were published in 1961 as Resistence, Rebellion and Death that he regarded as representing “the sum total” of his life. Included in those essays was Reflections on the Guillotine (Réflexions sur la guillotine).
In Chapter One of Dead Man Walking, as Helen takes her first steps outside the privileged world she’d inhabited since birth and into the housing projects of New Orleans, she describes how her reading landscape changes:
I am reading people like Gandhi, Alice Walker, Albert Camus, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, and even the way I pray is changing. Before, I had asked God to right the wrongs and comfort the suffering. Now I know — really know — that God entrusts those tasks to us.
Here’s what she has to say about reading Camus’ essay on the death penalty:
“Reflections on the Guillotine” is for me a moral compass on the issue of capital punishment. [Camus] wrote this essay in 1957 when the stench of Auschwitz was still in the air, and one of his cardinal points is that no government is ever innocent enough or wise enough or just enough to lay claim to so absolute a power as death.
For Graphic Dead Man Walking, it made sense to transform the many quotations from Camus’ that dot the original into a living, breathing character. And so, Albert pops up numerous times throughout the book, occasionally with a copy of Reflections on the Guillotine in his hands or on his lap.
Out of the margins and onto the page
My early ideas for these three marginal characters were, not unsurprisingly, utterly transformed in Catherine’s artist hands. What I had imagined as characters limited to the periphery of the pages, soon began appearing in a variety of guises and locations.
While Camus remains pretty much himself, surrounded by a blue glowing outline indicating his not-of-this-world nature in the story, Owracle and Pissant adopt multiple forms throughout the book, and make their way from the margins to center stage at times.
When you get your hands on a copy of the book, I hope you enjoy spotting how these three contribute to the narrative.
A punchline
It’s hard to title an episode of this newsletter “An owl, an ant and Albert Camus walk into a book...” without wishing to come up with a joke complete with a snappy punchline.
My best effort is this:
An owl, an ant and Albert Camus walk into a book. They meet at an outdoor cafe and sit together at a table. A figure shrouded in cloak and hood is seated at a nearby table, eating breakfast.
ANT: Look, look! They’re eating a croissant. Crumbs for the taking!
OWL: Hoo, hoo?
ALBERT CAMUS: L’étranger!
Drop me a line if you can come up with the perfect punchline.