The Master and Margarita in comic strips

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Introduction

Comic strips are not longer exclusively meant for children. Authors like Vittorio Giardino - my favourite - are mainly focusing on comic strips for adults, and they don't hesitate to convert literary masterpieces into images and text balloons. So it was to be expected that, one day, The Master and Margarita would be published in a comic strip version, although the harvest is disappointing, especially at the quality level.

The comic strips can not escape from the laws of the other media when The Master and Margarita are concerned. In this area many are called but few are chosen. For the time being, there are only three artists who were able to realise their ambition to produce a complete adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel. All the others had various reasons to drop out before the work was finished.

The first time that The Master and Margarita appeared in a comic strip was on the July 1, 1988, in the series X-men, which was created in 1963 by writer Stan Lee (1922-2018) and illustrator Jack Kirby (1917-1994) for the famous American publisher Marvel Comics. In issue number 231 of this series, the character Illyana Nikolyevna Rasputina, known as Magik, has to write a school assignment about The Master and Margarita. While she is doing that, Azazello, Behemoth and Koroviev suddenly appear. They kidnap her by order of the witch Baba Yaga.

The first author who ever succeeded in making a complete comic strip adaptation of The Master and Margarita was the Russian comic strip author Rodion Borisovich Tanaev (°1962) from Magnitogorsk in the south of the Urals.

When The Master and Margarita was performed in the theatre where he worked, Tanaev got the idea to tell the story in comic strip form. At a rhythm of one page per week, it took him two years before the work was finished. The album was published in Russia in 1997, but can hardly be found today.

All other full comic strip adaptations of The Master and Margarita are very disappointing, with the exception of the work of Bettina Julia Egger (°1981), born in Austria but living in France. In 2012, she wanted to tell the story of Mikhail Bulgakov and The Master and Margarita in comic strip format. She went to Moscow to visit the places of the novel, and to have discussions with people who know Bulgakov and his work well.

The result of all this labour is the album Moscou endiablé, sur les traces de Maître et Marguerite or Moscow in Rage, in the footsteps of the Master and Margarita, which has been published in June 2013 by the publishing house Moule-à-gaufres. It became, like The Master and Margarita, a fascinating work in three layers in which Bettina Egger interweaves the story of The Master and Margarita with the story of Mikhail Bulgakov's life and with her own exploration of the sources of the novel in Moscow.

The comic strip adaptations of The Master and Margarita are becoming fashionable in the academic world too: in June 2011, the Belgian student Maarten Van Tieghem got his master's degree at the Ghent University with his thesis From Novel to Graphic Novel.

Click here to download Maarten Van Tieghem's thesis


Missing

There's a possibility that I missed some comic strip adaptations. So, if you know about others, please don't hesitate to contact me.

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