Task: Create a series of comic pages based on a short story.

The Masque of the Red Death is a well-known short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. The story goes that there was in a kingdom a rich prince named Prospero who had an abbey with many rooms and a kingdom of dying subjects. The terrible plague took hold of all those who were outside of the mansion walls, and the only ones allowed inside were the Prince, his nobles and the entertainment. This way the plague, the Red Death named for its bleeding sores, would not penetrate and would let the nobility continue their merriment and debauchery.

The abbey or castle has seven rooms with windows of seven different colors, however the most important of these is the last with its black interior, red window and ominous clock. It strikes every hour and each time the partygoers freeze and listen to the terrible sound, only to laugh at themselves when it stops, saying that they will ignore it next time.

One day the clock calls the midnight hour and among them a stranger appears. The party is full of distasteful characters and costume, but none bring the suffering happening outside into their safe rooms like this figure does. It is dressed as the Red Death. Horror comes first, then rage. Prospero shouts in indignation, draws his dagger and makes an attempt to stab the offensive figure, only to fall, covered in red sores.

By the end the Red Death walks out of the abbey, having done its work.

The full story can be read here:

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

To get a good idea of the main points, structure and most vivid visual elements, I read the story several times and I took notes, extracting important quotes which would help me find the path I wanted the short graphic novel to take. Some of the more standout bits were: the visual potential of the seven colorful rooms, the dark room with the clock, the imposing nature of the stranger and, of course, the color red.

Before I could decide on the number of pages, I wanted to find what the approximate story beats are. This is what I came up with:

One: Poe presents the world the action takes place in and the terrible thing the nobles are running from. Two: We are introduced to the lavish revelry of the Prince and his colorful subjects as well as the abbey, which is almost a character on its own. Three: An element of discord manifests in the ticking clock, indicating that the partiers cannot ignore the illness outside forever. Four: The warnings are ignored repeatedly and more scenes of debauchery are alluded to. Five: The Red Death arrives and they despise it on sight because of the reminder it brings, only Prospero has enough courage to confront it and dies first for it.

An interesting note: there is only one line of dialogue in the whole story (or monologue, I guess). It is Prospero’s line as he attacks the terrible figure. It is otherwise mentioned that the courtiers murmur but there are no real lines.

Examples of the telling:

There are many retellings of the classic horror tale in visual form, including comics and films. They all tend to pick and choose basic elements of the short tale and then run with them, building new ideas and creating something unique. The illustrations above are perhaps the ones I enjoy the most because of their timelessness and real sense of drama. The comics below, however, really get to delve into the more bizarre and grotesque elements of Poe’s story.

One cannot move on without mentioning the classic poster for the film. From far away, it is a red Vincent Price, but from up close it is the miniature “orgy of evil” advertised.

Although I personally enjoy the style of the more traditional illustrations, the graphic novels were a little more helpful in showing what options I had to choose from when it comes to portraying the story, mostly  because of the way they deviated from it. In some ways the story resembles the original tale very little. And while I personally chose to stick closer to the source material, looking for other representations gave me the confidence to be creative in my exploration of the tale. The retellings I looked at mostly had to be changed because the story is very short and in order to make a full film or a full comic, they had to add something resembling plot and/or relatable characters. Because my own version of the story did not need to be very  long, in fact the shorter the better, I did not elect to build on the story in any way. I fact, I tried to keep as close to the source material as possible.

After I established what main beats of the story, I started sketching them out and playing with ideas. Each beat of the story would be granted a single page. Some were better than others and a few had to eventually be separated in multiple pages in order to create more impact when it came to certain scenes. What were five points eventually became about twelve which got narrowed down to seven.

The seven compositions I settled on:

Page 1 presents the outside world and the illness outside of the abbey walls. The structure must loom over the ill people outside the gates. Page 2 shows the seven rooms where the action takes place. I elected to make these as colorful as possible and excluded the seventh room, which I reserved entirely for Page 3  in order to highlight the importance of the clock and because the two pages require entirely different moods. Page 2 is all revelry and color and page 3 is darkness, terror and the inevitable passing of time. Page 4 deviates compositionally, mostly because I wanted to show close up reactions of people from multiple rooms, hence the striated colors/ panels which I eventually used to represent the different rooms. It also deviates because it is the middle page of the seven compositions, all the others have pairs. Page 5, which finally shows the “Red Death” delivers on the promise made in Page 3 with the clock. Page 6 is dedicated to Prospero’s reaction, where Page 2 was dedicated to his riches. Page 7 resolves what is shown in Page 1.

In terms of medium, I elected to draw everything digitally because I knew it would be the simplest way to also include text without the artwork looking foreign, which I have noticed happens with my art style when drawn traditionally and then transferred to a digital medium. I do experiment with style a little in this project, which makes the final product look slightly inconsistent, or creative, depending on how you look at it.

The precise details of the pages changed slightly as the process continued, but once I linked excerpts of Poe’s text to each page and decided what was most important, the process stayed fairly on course.

Page 1:

Inspiration for the first page was mostly drawn from zombie movies. I thought that would be the most striking visual representation of living people with a deeply disturbing illness. This is the more painterly of the seven pages, along with Page 7, and is definitely the most gritty. I wanted to echo the horror elements that other media used to portray this story, so I used zombies (classic monsters) as models for the ill people, composed the image in such a way that the abbey structure looms over the people, set the action in a grey, rather dead looking landscape, and wrapped everything in the appropriate accoutrements: fog, moonlight, muted color palette with bright spots of color. The original intention was to leave the red spots the only bits of color, but I found that coloring in the windows for the seven rooms would much better establish their importance from the get-go.

Page 2:

The first intention had been to create a fairly typical comic book composition for presenting the first six rooms, but I had found it very dull and ended up experimenting with a very different sort of layout instead. Instead of showing six panels with the six rooms, one of which would have contained Prince Prospero, I decided to put the him straight in the middle with the colorful rooms encircling him. In each room, I depicted a type of entertainment listed in the story. The page stands in striking contrast to the previous one. It’s background is light and it’s panels are colorful. I even chose to use a slightly more cartoony style in order to contrast the fantasy created by the Prince within with the real horror without.

Page 3:

The character with the wings on this page isn’t really central to the narrative, but I do eventually end up bringing her back in the very last page. The eye of the reader follows her and discovers alongside her the clock with the pendulum inside the seventh room. Technically the “main character” of this page was supposed to be the clock itself, but I wanted to have someone the reader could react with, so I made a character that would sufficiently stand out against a dark background and put her there as a sort of audience vessel. This page contrasts  with the previous two. Instead of using a small dark panel to depict the “evil” space of the seventh room, I elected to make the entire page near-black and use that to convey the atmosphere.

Here I do use more traditional panels, though the character and the text do flow in and out of them. The sound effect for the clock does not exist in the story, but the impression of it is very strong in Poe’s writing. I chose to show an ominous, uneven ticking instead of the more traditional “tick-tock”, culminating in a slightly more grandiose “ding-dong”. The sound is not impaired by speech bubbles and the latter sound I chose to draw instead of type.

Page 4:

This page I changed very little because I found that it hit the mark quickly. While not a entirely typical composition, it is one that is used in comic books, especially when  trying to depict multiple people from multiple contexts reacting to something at the same time. The views alternate between showing the reactions to the awful clock in the colorful rooms and showing the omen which has them so worried in the black and red room.

Page 5:

This page is both a transition and a reveal. It mirrors Page 3 in its coloring and reminder of the clock, but it also includes the large, white panel with colorful partygoers. It presents the figure of the Red Death in the middle of the crowd in the White room. This is different from the original story. The reason I chose to put the  action in the White room is because this way I could highlight the gaudiness of the court by showing their clothes against a simple background. The Red Death, however stands among them in black and red.

Page 6:

Like Page 2, Page 6 centers around Prospero. It also contains the single line of dialogue in the entire story. I did not change it in the slightest, only separated it into different speech bubbles depending on how Poe himself separated it in his text. Pages six and two are both light and colorful and both meant to show the folly of Prospero and his people because they choose to cling to illusion while they are surrounded by death and dark. Prospero confidently tries to kill the specter, but only succeeds at bringing back darkness (in the last panel).

Page 7:

The last page, like the first is more painterly in style and brings back the  issue of death by horrible bleeding illness and it resolves the folly of Prospero. The composition had to be reworked several times due to difficult perspective and compositional choices, but I am happy with what I ended up using. The Red Death stands above its victims, masked and impartial, but devastating. I did my best to make it look frightening without making it directly menacing. The Red Death isn’t really the villain of the story as much as Prospero and his nobles are. I contemplated making it more hunched and menstruous, but felt that it would be too easy to put it in a box of villains that way. Instead I made the character as neutral as possible. Maybe even emotionless.

The page contains only one line from the end of the short story. I separated the line in two and then enlarged the last bit in order to give the text a sort of sense of finality without actually writing “The end.”

Cover:

Several iterations of the cover highlight a different parts of the story. The first the mask of the Red Death, the second the inevitable clock, in the third just simple typography, the fourth is more of a horror piece, and the fifth and sixth make use of Prospero’s fallen crown and the dagger he tried to kill the figure with. Each is great for different reasons, but I ended up choosing the clock version because I felt that it reveals just enough about the story to be interesting and because it doesn’t rely on images that are too typical for the story, like the mask. I debated using the last two with the crown and dagger, but it reminded me too much of illustrations for Macbeth or other Shakespeare plays that include a king and murder by stabbing.

I liked the simplicity of the clock design, which I took from Page 5 of the comic, and then expanded on it to better convey the gist of the story. I ended up adding a crown anyway, along with the abbey and the Red Death himself.

Putting my own spin to this story was a pleasure. It took entirely too much time, but I think I am mostly pleased with the results. The style of painting was mostly an experiment, as were the unconventional panel styles, but I think that with some more fine-tuning it could be something to incorporate in future projects. The experience of drawing a sequential series of drawings was very daunting, and I do not think I did a very good job of conveying movement. Perhaps I should have chosen a scene instead of an entire story, because in the set of seven pages, only one has a character actually moving with speed. The rest of the compositions are fairly static. Still, I confess the compositions weren’t much conceived as pages to flip through, but more as a set of seven pictures mounted next to each other in succession. Like a set of artworks. I am not sure the strategy worked here. A comic is to be something to flip through.

All things to consider for the next attempt!

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