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 Page A

in their defense. The alternatives available were either to omit several of the most important character moments, change the age of the character to fit contemporary legal standards regardless of the violence that would do to the intent of the story, or remain utterly faithful to the original text and prepare for scandal, censure, and legal action.
    The third issue that A Game of Thrones brought with it was that A Song of Ice and Fire is still in progress. In the previous adaptations I’ve done—of the novel Fevre Dream and the novella “The Skin Trade”—there has been a finalized story in print. By knowing the ending toward which the plot was progressing, it becomes possible to see how events were foreshadowed in the text, and how that could be recreated in images. A Game of Thrones , on the other hand, is the first book in a series that is expected to run seven volumes, the last three of which hadn’t been published when the first scripts were written for the graphic novel. A Song of Ice and Fire is also notable for its willingness to surprise and work against the expectations of the genre. Knowing which characters are important to the overall story—and even which ones will survive to the final volume—is almost impossible at this stage. When Robb Stark and Jon Snow find the direwolf pups, Eddard Stark’s full group is with them, something like eight or ten named characters. Drawing them all could be visually confusing and cluttered. But the fact that Theon Greyjoy was present may be important later on. What can be cut and what can’t simply isn’t obvious yet.
    That’s not true for every project. There are certainly long-running comic book series that have succeeded brilliantly without a strict continuity or foreshadowing that began years ahead. I’m thinking of ongoing serial (even soap-operatic) titles such as Batman or Spider-Man . But A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t open-ended. It does have a conclusion it moves toward, and in fact, the last sentence of the last book is already decided. Adapting the story without having the full text to judge still allows approaches ranging from strict adherence to the source material, to a good faith “best guess” on the adaptor’s part, to gathering information from lengthy interviews with George. It’s even possible to imagine an adaptation in which the ending of the graphic novels isn’t the same as the ending of the books, the two versions diverging as they progress, each controlled by its own internal logic. At that point, though, what exactly the adaptor is preserving rightly comes into question.
    So, in addition to the peculiar issues of A Game of Thrones , there are more general structural differences between prose and sequential art that constrain the boundaries of adaptation. These grow, for the most part, from the aural nature of written English.
    The literal symbols of English writing are encodings of sound, not vision. When reading prose silently, the sensual experience most immediately and easily evoked is sound, and the sound most easily evoked is the spoken voice of the characters or the narrator. This makes dialogue one of the strengths of prose fiction.
    Reading well-crafted dialogue is like eavesdropping. A few telling physical details and small actions are enough to let the reader create a full, complex, and satisfying experience of the scene; Viserys’s lilac eyes as he sniffs disdainfully at Dany’s gift of Dothraki clothing and Eddard testing Needle’s edge with his thumb during his talk with Arya happen within the context of longer conversations, and not every exchange includes details like these. Graphic novels, by contrast, require a full visual component, and the natural fit for two people having a conversation—a long series of pictures of the person or people talking—gets dull fast. Dialogue that crackles with life and vitality in prose gets tedious when it’s rendered as page after page filled with pictures of talking heads and