SotA Anthology 2015-16 | Page 69

ENGL362 are deliberately difficult for ‘You’ to make sense out of as they are infused with contradictory information, irregular dates and perplexing locations. On the comic page, the reader is pushed to solve the same mysteries as ‘You’, which continues to keep the distinction between the two blurred as both are simultaneously working to solve the same mysteries. Each issue contains one or two of these letters, up until Issue #6, where the final few letters are folded into frame narrative. On this particular page, his signature is obscured but the name ‘Ermes’ appears in the body of one letter, for readers to pick out. The page depicts the desk of Cavedagna. Red ink has been used to circle dates and annotate the letters to show Cavedagna’s fruitless attempt to understand where Ermes is and what order things are happening in. The ink is smudged in places, and a coffee ring marks the desk to suggest a certain disorderliness on Cavedagna’s part. Not all of the discrepancies have been caught by Cavedagna, but his initial markings are an invitation to the reader to hunt for clues themselves; some letters are sent from ‘Cerro Negro’, but the miniscule air mail stamp is from ‘Cerro Blanco.’ Most of the discrepancies are taken from the book directly, but this is an added visual quirk. The New York letter was copied word for word from the novel, but the Cerro Negro one was adapted to first person to convey the tone of “inspired evocation” the protagonist infers from the words. Penelope Lively believes that If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller both ‘tantalises and provokes’ the reader, leaving them ‘alternately exasperated and fascinated’ (cited in Orr, 1985, p.210). This adaptation has been carefully constructed to elicit both of these reactions in each reader, be they new to comics or new to the novel. However, veering too far into exasperation is a greater risk for a monthly comic series than a novel, since an exasperated reader who already owns the novel may still feel inclined to continue - as they can skim forward to find material that better captures their attention; gauge how much of the novel is left and weigh it up against their current frustration; and have usually purchased the novel in its entirety whereas the monthly serialisation of comics offers none of this security, plus the additional peril of its precarious position in a highly competitive market. Each issue must provide enough intrigue to convince the reader to keep buying from month to month, for the majority of a year. To combat this risk, the adaptation is very tightly structured, and very clear about it. It is strictly limited to ten issues,