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      Opera as Comics: Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung in Craig P. Russell’s Graphic Adaptation

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      Open Library of Humanities
      Open Library of the Humanities

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          Abstract

          The article explores the capacity of the comics medium to represent a complex opera cycle in a graphic narrative. It analyses specific features of transmedial transmission between opera and comics through the example of the most recent graphic adaptation of Richard Wagner’s dramatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung by P. Craig Russell, published by Dark Horse Comics (2000-2001). The adaptation, which fuses the disparate worlds of opera, comics, and fantasy culture, is stripped of Wagner’s controversial ideology. Russell interprets the Ring Cycle as an essential source of inspiration for American comics, thereby making this complex magnum opus attractive and accessible to wider audiences. His chief aim, however, is to reproduce an operatic effect by way of graphic mythic grandiosity. The study explores the visual aspects of the adaptation, addressing the potential of the comics medium to capture Wagner’s original vision. With a focus on illustration style and character depiction, this article discusses Russell’s imagery, which combines the classic illustrations of Arthur Rackham and Carl Emil Doepler, images from American popular culture, and Alan Lee’s illustrations of Tolkien’s series The Lord of the Rings. This article further analyses the methods of transmission of sounds into the silent medium, including both linguistic and visual means of expressing the intensity and quality of sound. Special attention is paid to the meaning and visual form of the Wagnerian leitmotiv as well as the use of colouring in relation to timing.

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          Crossmodal correspondences: a tutorial review.

          In many everyday situations, our senses are bombarded by many different unisensory signals at any given time. To gain the most veridical, and least variable, estimate of environmental stimuli/properties, we need to combine the individual noisy unisensory perceptual estimates that refer to the same object, while keeping those estimates belonging to different objects or events separate. How, though, does the brain "know" which stimuli to combine? Traditionally, researchers interested in the crossmodal binding problem have focused on the roles that spatial and temporal factors play in modulating multisensory integration. However, crossmodal correspondences between various unisensory features (such as between auditory pitch and visual size) may provide yet another important means of constraining the crossmodal binding problem. A large body of research now shows that people exhibit consistent crossmodal correspondences between many stimulus features in different sensory modalities. For example, people consistently match high-pitched sounds with small, bright objects that are located high up in space. The literature reviewed here supports the view that crossmodal correspondences need to be considered alongside semantic and spatiotemporal congruency, among the key constraints that help our brains solve the crossmodal binding problem.
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            A Theory of Adaptation

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              Literary Theory. An introduction

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Open Library of Humanities
                Open Library of the Humanities
                2056-6700
                June 30 2021
                September 16 2021
                : 7
                : 2
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Silesian University in Opava
                Article
                10.16995/olh.4680
                92af05b5-6548-4ca2-b636-3c8c33c474f4
                © 2021

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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