Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago by Unknown Read Free Book Online

other. I’ll give some examples of each.
    The first of the idiosyncratic issues was the place A Song of Ice and Fire had achieved in the cultural moment. Our adaptation of A Game of Thrones wasn’t the first one that the books had inspired. Before our comic book project began, there had already been replica swords, sculptures, and enough art to fill several calendars, card and board games, and two volumes of The Art of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire . The popularity of the novels had also inspired a television series that was already casting. Which is to say, A Game of Thrones was already in the center of a body of artistic work that had spread well beyond the book itself. How we chose to play off those existing visions of the characters, places, and events had practical implications for more than just us.
    There is an attraction to participating in a larger creative enterprise. If our Eddard Stark bore some resemblance to the actor cast in the television show, the image would gain something by the familiarity. Ted Naismith did brilliant versions of Winterfell and the Eyrie. John Picacio’s Eddard Stark, Jon Snow, and Daenerys Targaryen are wonderfully realized and compelling. These talented people have already created a bevy of first-class work. Why not build on what they’ve accomplished? The artistic argument against that strategy was that, in taking our lead from earlier artists, we would sacrifice something of our own originality and vision. By tying ourselves to what had come before, we would lose the opportunity to invent our own versions, maybe better, maybe not, but certainly more authentically our own. Neither was that the only consideration.
    As much as I would like to think that artistic concerns are first and last in all things, the constraints on a project are rarely exclusively aesthetic. The property for which we had rights was, and is, the original novel. While it would be possible to get the permission from the previous artists who had created versions of Westeros, keeping track of the full catalog of A Song of Ice and Fire creations and integrating them into our version of the story could prove more awkward, time-consuming, and unwieldy than starting from scratch. There would necessarily be some family resemblances among the various incarnations of A Game of Thrones . We are, after all, interpreting the same source material and sometimes artists naturally reach for the same solutions to common problems. And there were some real problems. For example, Daenerys.
    Daenerys Targaryen was the second issue that we faced, one specific to A Game of Thrones , and very thorny, both for us and for other adaptors. Her character arc in the book takes her from emotionally abused political pawn, through an arranged marriage that rightly lifts the ethical hackles of a contemporary readership, an overtly sexual coming-of-age, a pregnancy, and a miscarriage, to become a political leader and powerful force in her own right. Her sexual awakening and the relationship of her sexuality to power are central to her story, as are issues of consent, control, and fertility. At the beginning of the book, she is thirteen years old.
    There is an argument that drawing the story as it is written would be illegal .
    The PROTECT Act of 2003 prohibits “obscene visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct” where the term “obscene” is defined according to the Miller Test. That is, a work can be classed as obscene if it violates community standards, is patently offensive, and, as a whole, lacks literary or artistic value. Whether the comic would have met those standards would be for a court to determine, unless we did something that explicitly took into account the legal implications of moving from text to image. The television adaptation addressed this by casting an actress who was legally of age. The comic book has no actress, and so the images created of her don’t have an objective truth to use