Flipping through the pages, I saw slick graphics with digital lettering and coloring: an all-too familiar template for the kind of emptiness I have come to associate with the majority of modern commercial comic books released from book publishers who seem clueless about what is original and valuable in comic art. I saw Fordham had previously adapted Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird into graphic novel form (I have not read it), which suggested the creation of this book could be driven more by commerce and less by an original artistic vision. You know it’s a graphic novel because it says so on the cover. I groaned when I picked up Fred Fordham’s new graphic novel adaptation of Huxley’s celebrated novel, just released from HarperCollins in standard issue full-color hardcover. After all, it was written by the author of The Doors of Perception, an early bible of the '60s drug culture (and the inspiration for a rock band’s name). One can see the book as a wry Switftian satire, or a grim and decidedly unfunny cautionary tale instrumental in showing how science fiction as a literary genre could be relevant and vital. Since its 1932 publication, Brave New World has regularly appeared on shortlists of the best novels of the 20th century. In a time of great instability, Huxley created a vision of a perfectly stable world, but-instead of being a comfort-it was an alarm. In the long-ago and oddly familiar era of the 1930s, novelist Aldous Huxley cast his imagination far into the future, extrapolating the relatively new developments of genetics and social engineering into a horrifically bland world. I guess I don’t believe in a sanity clause, after all. Nearly a century later, the potency of non-ironic, absurdist humor has returned. Surreal, manic nonsense strips like Nize Baby (Milt Gross), The Squirrel Cage (Gene Ahern) and Smokey Stover (Bill Holman) provided much-needed laughs in the graveyard night. People went a little nuts and this was reflected in popular culture. Others sat on flagpoles or danced in marathons that went on for days. In between fighting two world wars, and a plague, the economy collapsed and business people jumped off buildings in despair. Back then, women’s constitutional right to vote was just over 10 years old and they would not be able to get legal abortions anywhere in the United States for about another 40 years. I found this out when I explored screwball comics and discovered they peaked in the 1930s. The 2020s have much in common with the 1930s.
Adapted from William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll.
How beauteous comic art is! O brave new world,
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