Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 267 Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos Kutztown University and Rutgers University Abstract: This essay considers Peter Eickmeyer’s adaptation of Remarque’s classic text Im Westen Nichts Neues . Although Eickmeyer’s version does modify and recast traditional properties of comics, it also amalgamates artistic impulses from other eras and formats to create a comic art character not so easily described with conventional comics criteria. Im Westen draws on both verbal and pictorial modes of narration in order to produce a largely unchanged, if somewhat abbreviated, but highly intertextual version of Remarque’s original novel. Through detailed comparisons between Remarque’s original text, visual art traditions, and film, the essay demonstrates that instead of merely imbuing the original novel with illustrations as some critics have claimed, Im Westen responds to and assimilates other adaptations of the source text and works of art that have shaped a public understanding of World War I. The essay argues that Im Westen reveals that Eickmeyer indeed gained more artistic inspiration from other adaptations of Remarque’s text than the source text itself. Keywords: All Quiet on the Western Front, Im Westen nichts Neues, World War I, comics, graphic novels, adaptation studies, intermediality, intertextuality, film studies In his remarks published as an appendix to Peter Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel (henceforth Im Westen ), Thomas Schneider, director of the Erich Maria Remarque-Friedenszentrum in Osnabrück, writes about the odd publication circumstances of the Classics Illustrated version of Remarque’s original, despite the fact that the Illustrierte Klassiker series began appearing in Germany in the 1960s: 268 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos Allerdings wurde eine deutsche Übersetzung und Ausgabe der Adaption von Delbourgo nie publiziert, obwohl nahezu alle anderen Hefte von Classics Illustrated auf Deutsch erschienen. Hier zeigten sich die in der Bundesrepublik immer noch vorherrschenden Ressentiments gegen Remarque als ‘Nestbeschmutzer’ und ‘Vaterlandsverräter’, die seit der Hetze durch die Nationalsozialisten und andere Kriegsbefürworter bereits in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren in der Weimarer Republik in die Welt gesetzt worden waren und auch im Nachkriegsdeutschland eine ungebrochene Kontinuität erlebten. (n. pag.) Presumably, many Germans would not consider the comic book format of Classics Illustrated , whose aesthetic did not differ so much from their contemporary Superman comics, an appropriate medium to convey Germany’s military experience during World War I. Reasons for this hesitation become clearer when one regards the reception history of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel Im Westen nichts Neues , which had received mixed reviews, not surprisingly divided along national lines. Historically, American critiques were largely positive and lauded the novel as a powerful testament against war, but the novel’s themes proved too controversial for a German audience (Wagener 33—34). In a more striking contrast, readers in countries on the winning side classified the book as high literature while readers in defeated countries viewed it as a political manifesto with a potential negative impact on individuals and political factions (Barker and Last 35—36). This observation underscores the enduring critical commentary surrounding Remarque’s text and confirms the potential for controversy and debate about a German adaptation. Eickmeyer’s Im Westen joins this cultural dialogue at a pivotal time, as the German-language Illustrierte Klassiker series, known for its adaptations of celebrated literary classics, lists an upcoming publication date of 2020. Although Im Westen does modify and recast comics properties, it also amalgamates artistic impulses from other eras and formats to create a comic art not so easily described with conventional criteria. The ongoing hesitation in Germany to publish Im Westen nichts Neues as an Illustrierte Klassiker lends a certain timeliness to the discussion of the aesthetic means with which Im Westen conveys Remarque’s story. This connection to the book series has particular relevance because part of Im Westen ’s aesthetic is grounded in the tradition of abridged books and in particular the format that can be found in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and The Classics Illustrated book series. In these collections, considerable chunks of the original novels were omitted, but the selected passages chosen for the respective editions remained for the most part unaltered. Classics Illustrated offered modified, shortened, and easy-to-read accounts of the original texts in large print featuring illustrations on almost every other Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 269 page. As a point of comparison to Im Westen , an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front was published in the United States through the series of Classics Illustrated in 1952. Unlike Eickmeyer’s text, however, the Classics Illustrated version is highly sequential in nature, featuring elements distinctive to the comic book medium such as speech-balloons, conventional panels and captions. In surveying the particular look and style of the cartoon-like overlays that consistently appear throughout Im Westen , it would also seem that Eickmeyer’s text reflects some aesthetic characteristics of the 1952 Classics Illustrated version of All Quiet on the Western Front , offering initial evidence for our argument that Eickmeyer took more artistic inspiration from adaptations of Remarque’s text than the source text itself. Eickmeyer departs from the uniformly sized panels and comic colors in favor of a hybrid creation that fuses more than a century of artistic impulses and examples of artistic reception of war. Very similar to the above-mentioned published formats that blend elements of a source text and original pictorial complement by individual artists, Im Westen draws on both verbal and pictorial modes of narration in order to produce a largely unchanged, if somewhat abbreviated, but highly intertextual version of Remarque’s original novel. When a comic or graphic novel adaptation of a classic work of literature appears, critics often maintain that the artists provide a very clear visual rendition of the work and thus deliver an unambiguous, pre-interpreted version of the source text that essentially prevents readers from developing their own interpretation and personal association with the literary work. Corresponding to this form of analysis, some of Eickmeyer’s critics have given Im Westen the perfunctory label “illustrierter Roman” (Witte n. pag.). For other critics, the designation “graphic novel” as part of Eickmeyer’s title has sparked a discussion—all too familiar to comic book theorists—about what constitutes a comic or graphic novel, which leads us to a note about terminology. Over the past few decades, scholars have come to use these words interchangeably: we have decided to use the term comics. In this essay, we respond in part to a challenge of sorts issued by one of Germany’s leading comics scholars, Ole Frahm: “Es müsste vielmehr untersucht werden, wie Krieg im Comic überhaupt darstellbar ist” (266). Frahm’s general statement takes on particular significance in Germany and when speaking about World War I, because rendering the war theme itself has proven problematic in the past. Especially with regard to Im Westen nichts Neues , some historians have divided accounts of wartime experiences into the historical front, which explains by means of fact, and the “Western front of literature and pop culture,” which, like comics, stylizes those facts to produce a certain message (Badsey 51). Im Westen , published exactly one-hundred years after the start of World War I, underscores intertextual characteristics that gesture to an equally long 270 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos history of portraying the Great War in art. We argue in this essay that instead of merely imbuing the original novel with illustrations, Im Westen responds to and assimilates other adaptations of the source text and works of art that have shaped a public understanding of World War I. Incorporating “Reminiszenzen an andere Visualisierungen dieses Romans” (Comickunst n. pag.), Im Westen ’s intertextuality is built on a system of graphic quotations and visual citations from across media and time periods, including visual art and film. At this point, a brief outline of standard comics characteristics is necessary as these criteria still tend to inform readers’ expectations when reading comics and did in fact form the basis for much of Im Westen ’s criticism. Will Eisner, whose A Contract with God (1978) has often been credited with being the first graphic novel, uses the term “sequential art” to describe the storytelling method of comics. Eisner calls sequential art “a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea” (5). Eisner also adds the very significant distinction that sequential art is an “‘art of communication’ more than simply an application of art” (6). In other words, sequential art has distinctive and powerful storytelling qualities. Scott McCloud, whose Understanding Comics (1993) has become the standard theoretical text for comics studies, offers the following definition of sequential art: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence” (9). Although this definition may sound heavily simplified, Understanding Comics meticulously dissects the medium of comics into smaller identifiable components, such as panels, speech, and thought balloons, which have come to represent a vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of comics art. Similar to McCloud and Eisner, Thierry Groensteen has elaborated the notion of sequentiality, arguing that a single image does not have the same storytelling potential as a series or sequence of images that work together. If we adhere to standard definitions of comics, and specifically sequentiality, then Im Westen ’s critics are correct in saying that it does not conform. But, as Charles Hatfield has argued in Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature : “[R]eaders are guided by expectations born of habit, and artists by ‘rules’ born of long usage, but the makeup of the page need not follow any set pattern. […] [W]ithin the larger field of word/ image study, comics are a wandering variable” (xiv). Likewise Michael Levine, in his reading of Art Spiegelman’s Maus , discusses the potential of alternative patterns and page layouts that build upon the basic comic element of the panel. Levine defines the panel as a “picture window,” or “a kind of window with a picture on it […]. For not only can each window be broken down into individual panes, but these subwindows can in their turn be reworked into a mise-èn-abime structure of panes within panes” (Levine Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 271 25). Whether talking about a panel, a splash page, or any other form of framed picture, static or not, the possibility of “panes within panes” always exists. As Levine formulates it when discussing Spiegelman: Through this comixing of words and images Spiegelman prompts one to see the panel as a picture and a window, as an oxymoronic “picture window” that must at once be looked at and looked through: looked at because its signifying surface does not simply efface itself, does not merely yield before the authority of a signifying reality or become a transparent means to an end outside itself: looked through because such “picture windows” do open onto other windows, onto the abyssal depths of panes within panes. (Levine 25) Levine’s implication of intertextuality plays a central role in the present analysis because each panel of a comic book, or in this case pages from Im Westen can include references that point readers to other sources and invite them to read the graphic text, with its immense intertextual depth and complexity, in relation to and in dialogue with other works. Despite the absence of traditional panels in Im Westen , the multiple references and allusions on the pages of the book reveal a mise-en-abîme structure (or representation of a work embedded in a work) that opens up windows within windows, panes within panes, panels within panels. This kind of broadly defined intertextuality can of course be applied to every work of art exhibiting such qualities. As Graham Allen remarks in his work Intertextuality : “Intertextuality is one of the most commonly used and misused terms in contemporary critical vocabulary. […] Such a term is in danger of meaning nothing more than whatever each particular critic wishes it to mean” (2). Our study of Eickmeyer’s graphic novel employs the same term equally as broadly and chiefly as a means to foreground the multiple references that the work’s pages exhibit. Those references, as we shall highlight throughout our study, urge readers and critics alike to read them in conjunction with the source text and its cinematic and graphic adaptations. Throughout Im Westen every page is marked by visual quotations from a plethora of works and art forms. The same sources and references, embedded in Eickmeyer’s full-page images, function as panels within the pages that provide additional information to Remarque’s unaltered albeit abridged text, thus complicating the already highly complex source text. While it can be argued that Im Westen does not contain many conventional comics features, or enough to move it beyond the category of illustrated novel, it does, however, make the full-page splash panels and double splash pages into Hatfield’s “wandering variable.” In conventional terms, comics artists usually employ splash pages, also sometimes called bleeds, sparingly in order to emphasize a certain scene, theme, or motif. McCloud articulates the aesthetic 272 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos affect of these types of panels or pages and the technique’s ability to convey timelessness: “[t]ime is no longer constrained by the familiar icon of the closed panel, but instead hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space. Such images can set the mood or a sense of place for whole scenes through their lingering timeless presence” (103). In his discussion of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde , Charles Acheson describes how the graphic artist “destabilizes the normative sequential flow by incorporating a bleed panel,” which functions as a moment of pause “often employing complex backgrounds that amplify the timeless sensation found in such panels” (302). Comics artists also often deploy these panels or pages as a means of surprise, creating a sort of shock effect when readers turn the page and are confronted with a full-page panel. As Alan Moore remarks in his reflections on the comic book medium: “Since I’m aware that pages 2 and 3 are on left-hand and right-hand pages respectively, it would seem advantageous to save any big visual surprise until page 4, so that the reader doesn’t see it until he turns over. Thus, page 3 ends with a teaser” (36). The act of turning the page acts in this instance as a “cut,” analogous to the term and function used in film, because readers can only assume what will follow. The full-page splash panel or double splash page should ideally catch readers by surprise when they actually get to see the next page. With its use of splash pages Im Westen , however, does not merely interrupt or “destabilize” a “normative sequential flow,” or employ them as an element of surprise. Instead, the majority of Im Westen consists of mostly double-splash pages. Im Westen ’s version of the destabilization technique occurs when it interrupts, to the annoyance of some of the critics, Eickmeyer’s strikingly crafted paintings with the large text boxes or with the slightly cartoonish-looking characters that appear in smaller panels on top of the larger panels. A closer examination of one of these pages, the poppy field scene (n. pag.), whose layout is representative of many pages in Im Westen , demonstrates the author’s consistent and systematic implementation of splash pages, which taken together mirror the “cumulative effect” of the original, “held together, not by the traditional glue of a developing action […] but rather by broader thematic links” (Barker and Last 48). The double splash page depicting the poppy field offers much symbolic potential and reflects the original text’s interspersing of action and rest, combat and contentment (Wagener 18). As Eickmeyer explained in a 2014 interview with a Bielefeld television station, despite the page’s cheerful colors, poppies are traditionally viewed as symbols that commemorate war dead; and each one in this painting, according to Eickmeyer, represents someone lost in war (“Im Profil”). The final layout printed in the graphic novel, however, reveals additional layers of meaning. Upon viewing this page, perhaps readers can relate to critics’ frustration of not being able to take in the entire background picture Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 273 without the interference of the smaller illustrated blocks and overlaid text. Most readers accustomed to comics would also probably agree that a sequential set of panels and related text is notably missing. Although the page’s superimposed elements do in fact hinder a clear view of the landscape painting, they perform an important narrative task. The verbal component provides the narrator’s description of one particular day and the conditions under which the soldiers live. The text is largely positive, with commentary on receiving mail and enjoying the blue sky and poppies, which the double page allows the author to show in great abundance. The smaller overlaid panels zoom in on individual soldiers reading their mail or contemplating other aspects of their living conditions. Another smaller panel offsets the larger blocks of text to create the effect of a sidebar, with the specially selected quotation: “Kropp holt einen Brief hervor. ‘Ich soll euch grüßen von Kantorek.’ Wir lachen. Müller wirft seine Zigarette weg und sagt: ‘Ich wollte, der wäre hier’” (n. pag.). The last sentence on the page reads “Wir beschließen, ihn nachmittags zu besuchen,” following a dialogue about a comrade, Kemmerich, who “liegt in St. Joseph—er habe einen Oberschenkeldurchschuß.” Conveying a much different impression than the original painting alone, the layered details suggest that these fleeting idyllic moments are interrupted by the day-to-day reality of war, the desire to see a long-lost friend or to visit one who has sustained injury in battle. 274 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos In the remainder of this essay, we will explain why it is more important to concentrate on Eickmeyer’s departure from common comics standards and delineate how that divergence draws specific and sustained attention to his system of visual citation. Eickmeyer adapts recognizable icons of other anti-war artists to create “windows” similar to those described above and, in the words of one of Im Westen ’s reviewers, “einen neuen Zugang […] zum Erinnerungsschatz aller Europäer” (Lüddemann n. pag.). Especially important about the concept of visual citation is that the shared cultural archive from which Eickmeyer draws does not only consist of the recognizable images from other artists and from other time periods but also the corresponding history of criticism for each of the works. As such, they allow a sort of rhetorical shorthand or automatic indexing of themes and motifs for Eickmeyer’s readers. The process of citing elements of a recognized work of art inside another work of art, as opposed to simply duplicating or providing a print of the same, emphasizes the aspect of adaptation that requires entering into dialogue with the artists, their artwork, and their interpretations of the war phenomenon. As mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, in addition to focusing on Im Westen ’s non-compliance with conventional criteria of comics and graphic novels, critics have also withheld the term “graphic novel” when writing about the book, instead labeling it an “illustrated novel.” If we regard the book as an adaptation especially notable for its visual quotations and references to other media, then we might agree with the critic who called Im Westen “bildgewaltig,” containing: “Seiten, die man aufgrund ihrer Ausdruckskraft immer wieder ansehen kann.” 1 Similar to war-themed films, and especially Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front , Im Westen exhibits a keen “eye for mass movement, as in battle painting” (Williams 172). In fact, some of Im Westen ’s landscapes and full-page splash panels share noticeable characteristics with battle painting and in particular British battle painting, which does not have an equivalent in German visual art trends of that time. According to Paul Fox, these battle paintings often served as a type of cultural response to war, and “as a component of ‛a culture of war’” from the early twentieth century (812). Eickmeyer’s text cites aspects of these works of art, mimicking select characteristics of the pastoral paintings, but also reinterpreting individual portraits by imbuing them with cartoon-like or at least non-realistically sketched attributes. Although there are many to compare, we have chosen to discuss in particular James Clark’s oil painting The Great Sacrifice (1914), which bears aesthetic similarities to some of Im Westen ’s splash pages, especially the brush strokes of oil painting. The Great Sacrifice depicts a young soldier who has been killed in battle beneath a vision of Christ on the cross. The bluish colors and ordered composition convey a mood of peacefulness for the fallen but also for the paint- Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 275 ing’s viewers, who should ideally understand the purpose of battle and war as a necessary sacrifice. The most prevalent visual citation, and one that draws an immediate connection to Eickmeyer’s creations, is the washed-out oil paint look that the background of Clark’s painting and several of Eickmeyer’s paintings exhibit. The works do not only share this aesthetic similarity, but also thematic overtones as well: other pages in Im Westen feature the dying or deceased soldier as well as religious iconography. In contrast to the largely propagandistic British wartime paintings, however, Im Westen undercuts the plaintive, even positive, message with its use of dark foreboding colors, grotesquely drawn figures, and misshapen crosses. According to Fox, the intention behind the Great War paintings, to which The Great Sacrifice belongs, was to “memorialize and mythologize the war’s events for future generations” (811). Additionally, this sub-genre of paintings presents “nothing more than simply visual narratives lacking any complex message beyond an allusion to mankind’s faithful devotion in time of crisis.” They portray with their images the theme of sacrifice, “the universal watchword of the moment” (Harrington 147). Although Im Westen superficially simulates aesthetic aspects of these war paintings, it also calls this devotion and admirable sacrifice into question. This examination aligns more with the following assessment of the Great War itself as the anti-pastoral art “without heroes, without a tradition, and without Nature, in which men were martyrs and the earth was a devastated anti-landscape” (Hynes n. pag.). Im Westen invites an interrogation of the battle paintings with their propagated straightforward meanings by adding the blocks of text and modifying the depiction of the soldiers into cartoon-like renditions, more aesthetically aligned with the comic style of the Classics Illustrated renditions. In this way, Eickmeyer’s message conflicts with the romantic notions and religiously guided illustrations of self-sacrifice depicted in much of the battle painting. Similar to the 1930 film version by Lewis Milestone, the graphic novel shows through its layering technique a celebration of the anti-war sensibility and a critique of the “inadequate myopic representation of the trenches” (Westwell 22). The visual “interruptions,” as well as the visual citations of artwork that much more resemble Otto Dix’s grotesque anti-war series Der Krieg , essentially unsettle the larger idealized landscape of propagated feelings, as seen with artists like Clark, toward the war and present the anti-war sentiment of the Western front. Because of its multi-layered intertextuality, some stylistic similarities do in fact thread through Im Westen , but the work is also marked by stylistic variations, which correspond to the wide spectrum of “graphic quotations” that Eickmeyer employs. Further examples of intertextual visual arts references from the early twentieth century include prints by Otto Dix (1891—1969). As opposed to 276 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos a mural or landscape format, which could correspond to a splash or bleed panel in comics terms, Dix’s canvases (all taken from his series 1924 Der Krieg ) more readily find their comics equivalents in the single panel. One very recognizable example is a cited version of Otto Dix’s Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (1924). In the original painting, the oversized eyeholes of the gas masks make direct contact with the viewer, the comics art equivalent of direct address (Cumming 38). The soldiers hold weapons aloft and their posture suggests their forward motion. Dix’s soldiers look belligerent and ready to fight while Eickmeyer’s are at rest, waiting. Eickmeyer juxtaposes the following text over the image, words that could also provide a fitting caption for the reinterpreted Dix painting: Die Tage gehen hin, und jede Stunde ist unbegreiflich und selbstverständlich. Die Angriffe wechseln mit Gegenangriffen, und langsam häufen sich auf dem Trichterfeld zwischen den Gräben die Toten. Die Verwundeten, die nicht sehr weit liegen, können wir meistens holen. Manche aber müssen lange liegen, und wir hören sie sterben. (n. pag.) As mentioned above, visually cited art carries many of the associations and interpretations of the original source texts, in this case those of Dix, who during Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 277 the time of the Weimar Republic expressed his vehement reaction to World War I through his paintings. Relevant for the present discussion of an adaptation of Im Westen nichts Neues , Fox asserts that Dix’s artwork has much in common thematically with German war literature “that takes as its subject personal experience at the front” (250). With his art, Dix, a veteran, invites “his spectators to gaze at a self-portrait” (254). The careful combination of visually cited art, with all of its previous associations, Eickmeyer’s version, and the original line from the novel cooperate to intensify the “messages” of, to use Eickmeyer’s term, the Antikriegsklassiker Remarque and Dix. In addition to the highly identifiable Sturmtruppe , Eickmeyer’s text also visually cites throughout the book prominent motifs found in Dix’s Der Krieg , revealing overlapping themes between the original novel, Dix’s work, and Im Westen ’s visual quotations or citations. One such motif can be seen on Eickmeyer’s cover page, which shows black, white, and grey barren trees in a devastated and ravaged landscape. Similarly, Dix’s Verlassene Stellung bei Neuville features the same coloration and a dry, broken tree that displays striking similarities to Im Westen ’s cover art. Dix’s print goes further to depict the ravaged bodies and dismembered body parts that complete the World War I landscape. Although not on the cover, Im Westen also includes these motifs of mutilated bodies and severely damaged natural landscapes throughout the book. Incidentally, the resemblance between Eickmeyer’s cover and a still from Milestone’s film, a scene towards the end of the film (2: 05: 23), is even more striking. With Der Krieg , Dix thematized the nauseating reality of war and the human manifestations of endurance as well as depravity, for example by explicitly sketching military hospital amputees and soldiers vomiting from a face as opposed to a mouth, as the fronts of their heads have been shattered. By juxtaposing and recasting cited or quoted examples of traditions in visual art, Im Westen affords a new look into these realities and paradoxes for a new generation of readers. In another example of a striking visual quotation, Eickmeyer’s cover image can also be seen as a direct reference to a photograph by Ernst Friedrich. It is significant to note here that Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege (1924) , from which the cited photo was taken, captured the horror of the Great War through the photographic medium, which has traditionally been seen as a technical and accurate means to capture reality. This notion has been heavily disputed, with opponents arguing that photographs do not necessarily act as a mirror of reality, but Friedrich’s work achieved its goal by becoming one of the most influential and powerful anti-war books of its time. In areas of media specificity, some might argue that photographic coverage influences the viewer more immediately and convincingly than strictly verbal or even graphic texts that contain stylized pages and panels. This distinction between painting and photography or film is fitting 278 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos for Im Westen because many of its pages are prints of large paintings that Eickmeyer completed and subsequently merged with excerpts from the original text. Contrasting the notion that media such as photography and film create a more immediate experience, Acheson argues that graphic novels do not eliminate the “like being there” effect: instead they “engage readers to understand the event through exploring their responses when completing closure” (306). The definition of closure in the context of reading graphic texts has to do with readers taking visual and linguistic cues in order to build a “unified reality” that bridges any gaps between panels or pages (McCloud 67). The graphic novel alternately shows life and death throughout the book, which corresponds to Dix’s and Friedrich’s motifs depicting the overall thematic of the drive for survival alongside those depicting inevitable and unpreventable death. Philipp Gutbrod writes about Dix’s acceptance of war as a natural phenomenon that must be experienced to be believed and appreciated: “Dix had absorbed the human impact of war and its visual and acoustic materialization with all his senses” (34). Eickmeyer did not experience war in the trenches as both Remarque and Dix had; but his work displays clear parallels to other artworks. The striking similarities between Im Westen and its visual citations suggest the definitive and direct aesthetic and thematic influences of these previous works on Eickmeyer’s text; and the embedded citations convey to readers the impact of war as depicted by significant examples from a history of war-themed art and literature. Another very prominent and recognizable intertextual reference is Picasso’s well-known anti-war-themed mural Guernica (1937). Like other artists of warthemed works of art, Eickmeyer seems to have reached decisions on how to represent the catastrophe without trivializing it, as Picasso also had to in his composition of Guernica . Eickmeyer’s choice of this source painting is particularly intriguing as Picasso himself also drew inspiration from other artworks during the creation of Guernica . One source that he used is Peter Paul Rubens’ 1638 The Horrors of War . Although the aesthetics are clearly very different, the compositions of the two paintings correspond to one another and convey a similar sense of hectic chaos. A second inspiration for Picasso was Jacob Jordaens’s Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man from 1642, from which Picasso takes the motif of the light bearer (seen in Picasso’s own Minotauromachy from 1935), which also conveys a sense of uncontrollable turmoil and disorder as people, creatures, and objects frame a crazed-looking Diogenes in the center. In analyzing Guernica, Richard Rhodes comments that “every image has its double or triple”; and that Picasso performs his version of graphic citations in order “to anchor and extend Guernica into history, to deepen it with the visual equivalent of allusion and metaphor” (22). These instances of influence and their purposes also hold true for Im Westen . Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 279 Eickmeyer’s original painting, as opposed to the one that appears in the graphic novel with the overlaid panels, comes across as a disjointed hybrid, featuring an enlargement of the horse’s head central to Picasso’s painting and a more realistic rendering of soldiers and their horses, some still alive, some injured and dying. While the graphic novel version also, like Picasso’s, provides a non-realistic, stylized version of the horse and other objects in the painting, the graphic novel page achieves a different composition than the original painting with its added blocks of text. A smaller panel to the right seems to refer to the horse seen in Picasso’s Minotauromachy . The text that appears in the box on the same page as the crying and grotesquely disfigured horses reads as follows: “Es wird stiller, doch das Schreien hört nicht auf” (n. pag.). The scene primarily concerns the “allergrößte Gemeinheit, daß Tiere im Kriege sind,” describing “der Jammer der Welt” that occurs when horses are shot and injured. Undoubtedly readers’ familiarity with the Picasso painting instantly provides additional layers of meaning. Even those not familiar with the visually cited work, however, can view Eickmeyer’s layout of image and words on their own merit and experience how the comics medium “possess[es] unique elements that expand the role of the traumatic witness” (Acheson 305). By remediating the central horse motif from Guernica , Im Westen seems to be answering the same question that Picasso had while composing Guernica: how can one express abhorrence via visual means? Eickmeyer’s adaptation answers this question in its own intertextual way by merging elements of other works of art whose creators also used art in an attempt at an answer to that question. 280 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos Since its inception in the 1950s and up to the late 1980s, the notion of fidelity, and especially fidelity of film adaptations to literary source texts, has dominated the scholarly field of adaptation studies. The fidelity argument privileges the source text as a self-contained and original work and views the adaptation as merely a condensed, visual alternative to celebrated literature. Despite George Bluestone’s seminal work Novel into Film (1968) and his media-specific approach that broke new ground within the field in the late 1950s, the theoretical debate about film adaptations continued to center on fidelity until the early 1980s. The last two decades of adaptation studies, however, have begun to emphasize more and more the intertextual dimension of adaptations. 2 In his article Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation , for instance, Robert Stam reflects on the way that film adaptations operate on a tense intertextual level that seems to be an integral part of the adaptation process: “Film adaptations, then, are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin” (66). Stam challenges the supremacy of source texts by emphasizing the intertext in which texts are rooted: Adaptations, then, can take an activist stance toward their source novels, inserting them into a much broader intertextual dialogism. An adaptation, in this sense, is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogical process. The concept of intertextual dialogism suggests that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces. All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and unconscious quotations, and conflations and inversions or other texts. (64) Following Stam’s reasoning, the novel on which an adaptation of any kind is based becomes only one reference out of many to the original text. In the case of Im Westen, prior film adaptations of Remarque’s novel have become to some degree more significant in terms of their narrative style and choice of imagery than the novel itself. The same can be said about many works of art cited visually in the graphic novel. In addition, text and images do not necessarily have to work together in generating the narrative because the unaltered text from the novel does not require any supplementary images to tell its story. By visualizing key elements of the text and referring to other works of art, however, the images do expand the possibilities of how the text is read. The close reading of the film that follows in this section begins with a thematic approach; that is, how Im Westen follows similar thematic patterns as the 1930 film. The analysis continues with a side-by-side comparison of the same scene in each medium in order to emphasize the visual citations that occur in Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 281 Im Westen . Eickmeyer’s referencing adaptations of Remarque’s novel facilitates a transfer of associations of those works onto Im Westen , while stacking existing media allows the graphic text to reintroduce and reinterpret those associations. For example, Im Westen mirrors certain aspects of Lewis Milestone’s filmic interpretation, which in turn closely correspond to the original novel’s structure. Marzena Sokolowska-Paryż describes this structure: “emotionally appealing scenes alternating with gruesome depictions of the front line and disillusioning experiences” (117). Although the original novel is often associated with strictly gruesome scenes of trench warfare, it does in fact also portray times of contentment, “alternating themes quickly to show a wide range of experiences” (Murdoch 37). Im Westen presents these moments of alternating moods and themes with its vacillation between brightly colored and dark pages. In addition to remediating artwork and pairing those citations with excerpts from the book, Eickmeyer incorporates themes from the novel that are also expressed in filmic versions of Remarque’s novel. Robert Eberwein identifies these conventional scenes of anti-war films: “oppressive scenes of killing,” the “large meal” where men “sit around in a pleasantly lazy manner, simply enjoying being alive,” “the poster of a young girl,” “a hospital” and a “ghostly parade” of “dead soldiers superimposed over a shot of a cemetery” (69). According to Charles Urban, one of the first promoters of cinema as an educational medium: “a series of living pictures imparts more knowledge, in a far more interesting and effective manner, in five minutes, than does an oral lesson of an hour’s duration,” by “stimulating the imagination, especially of the visualizing eye” (qtd. in Orgeron 79). As in a film, the view that the artist provides in his panel when depicting these themes or motifs corresponds to the “camera restricted to confined space” which the viewer cannot escape, emphasizing the “immediacy of the medium” (Williams 187). This is another factor that can intensify the comics reading experience. If the film medium conveys this sense of no escape and immediacy, then the graphic novel medium intensifies these reactions even more, as readers are free to take their time on the page, discovering icons, symbols, and the significance of spatial composition at a much slower pace than viewing a film would allow. Scenes of soldiers “simply enjoying being alive” are predictably sparse throughout the novel, but composition and coloration of these scenes establish a distinct contrast to the battle scenes, which will be discussed in more detail below. The poppy field scene, discussed above, counts as a central episode that fits into the thematic category of more positive or tolerable wartime experience. For those instances, bright blues and a brighter red express feelings of comfort and happiness. A bright blue splash of color toward the center of the page also conveys this sense of contentment, even if fleeting. The soldiers recline in the grass and their faces look peaceful, if thoughtful: “Wir sitzen rund herum, die Hemden 282 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos auf den Knien, den Oberkörper nackt in der warmen Luft, die Hände bei der Arbeit” (n. pag). The figures appear cartoon-like against the oil-paint-style background that features broad strokes of the brush. A subsequent scene exhibits the same brush technique to create a darkened sky, but still with obvious hints of the blue that links it to the previous scene. Here, once again content-looking soldiers enjoy engaging in something other than battle: “Tjaden begrüßt und krähend. Dann spielen wir bis in die Nacht Skat” (n. pag.). From that point on, the scenes alternate between hospitals, damaged bodies, and battlefields, with the focus never returning to these contented and relatively peaceful scenes. The depictions of the “oppressive scenes of killing” do not take one form or exhibit one identifiable style in Eickmeyer’s text. Early in the novel, Paul Bäumer describes Behm’s death. His comrades thought he had been killed but he had only been unconscious: “weil er nichts sah und wild vor Schmerzen war, nutzte er keine Deckung aus, so daß er von drüben abgeschossen wurde” (n. pag.). A panel overlaying a watercolor and the box with the text depicts Behm in a trench, his body grotesquely contorted. Unlike a film depiction, his face and physical characteristics cannot be detected: thick black lines outline his body but also distort his features, leaving the reader with the task of interpreting the wounded body, similar to what Bäumer and the other survivors must do: “und wir mußten allein damit fertig werden” (n. pag.). In a later scene, Bäumer and his group arrive to a battlefield strewn with dead bodies. Eickmeyer has chosen once again to present the aftermath of the killing in a more abstract style; again with thick and jagged black lines. Nonetheless, the reader can certainly distinguish the presence of numerous symbols and iconography. Remarque wrote about “[verstreute] Särge und Leichen: Sie sind noch einmal getötet worden” (n. pag.). The torn-up train tracks and bodies are shown among other bodies in a smaller snapshot size panel. Below that panel, the reader can see an abstractly drawn figure with arms outstretched as if crucified. This motif complements the black crosses that adorn the page. Creating another striking image, the narrator describes the utility of a sharpened spade. Across the top of the page with the typical yellow, black, and brown coloration of other battle scenes, soldiers are seen in hand-to-hand combat, using whatever weapons they have at their disposal. Eickmeyer conveys the intimacy of this combat style in a panel that overlays the splash page battle scene. The view is from behind the enemy soldier: the German soldier’s eyes look directly into those of the enemy: “Der geschärfte Spaten ist eine leichtere und vielseitigere Waffe […]; besonders wenn man schräg zwischen Schulter und Brust trifft, spaltet man leicht bis zur Brust durch” (n. pag.). The accompanying image shows the described procedure exactly; and the reader is left to linger on the striking stream of red that contrasts the otherwise subdued colors. Later in the graphic novel, Eickmeyer provides Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 283 visual accompaniment for this part of Remarque’s novel: “Unsere Artillerie ist ausgeschossen—sie hat zu wenig Munition. […] Die Tanks sind vom Gespött zu einer schweren Waffe geworden” (n. pag.). The graphic novel once again deploys bright red, used otherwise sparingly throughout the novel, not to show the crushed bodies, but instead to show blood dripping down the page. We have briefly discussed some of the ways that the graphic novel visualizes scenes from the original novel. We now turn to a discussion of Im Westen ’s intertextuality by engaging in a close reading of a scene from the graphic novel and the same scene in the film adaptations. The very beginning of the graphic novel, a double splash page depicting soldiers waiting in line to get their food rations, displays anew rich intertextual layers. The soldiers in line appear at the bottom of the double splash page along with a building bearing a heavily damaged roof that can be seen at the lower side of the left page. At the bottom of that same page, the front part of a vehicle completes the imagery. A disproportionately large block containing Remarque’s original text occupies the upper left side of the page. Of central importance here, especially with regard to Delbert Mann’s 1979 film adaptation, are a series of panels and captions, eight in total, that fill the double splash page’s main surface. Each individual panel portrays one of the main protagonists: Paul Bäumer’s comrades and friends. The accompanying captions introduce the characters with descriptions taken from Remarque’s original novel, as is the case throughout Im Westen . The page that precedes the aforementioned double splash page, however, contains no images whatsoever, but rather the following passage from the novel: “Dieses Buch soll weder eine Anklage noch ein Bekenntnis sein. Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Krieg zerstört wurde - auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam” (Remarque 6). Mann’s film adaptation begins with the same epigraph, translated into English, that precedes Remarque’s novel. 3 In the opening scene of the film and before the opening credits, the viewer sees the same passage at the bottom of the screen before its gradual move upward and off the screen. The voice-over narrator provides an acoustic dimension to the epigraph by reading aloud the text the viewer sees on screen. This gesture might seem superfluous and repetitive at first, but it is, as we shall see, anything but redundant. The opening credits follow, running against the backdrop of a clear sky. Explosions in the shape of clouds appear and disappear in the background. The camera tilts downward, eventually framing the heavily damaged roof of a building, seemingly a church, that is very similar in appearance to the building in the graphic novel. A sudden explosion shatters the building and, after a cut, the viewer has the feeling of being dropped in the trenches. The following shot cuts to one of the main protagonists, Kat Katczinsky, as he walks through one of the trenches. The 284 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos voice-over, which appears here for the second time, introduces Kat and viewers recognize the voice as that of Paul Bäumer. The film introduces the characters in a series of close-ups with no cuts in between (tracking shot). While moving through the narrow passages of the trench, the camera pauses and lingers on each of the frightened soldiers before moving on to the next one. Every time that one of the characters is framed, the voice-over introduces him by name and provides additional information about his background. This calls to mind the original novel and the way the same characters are presented there: An der Spitze die Hungrigsten: der kleine Albert Kropp, der von uns am klarsten denkt und deshalb erst Gefreiter ist; - Müller V, der noch Schulbücher mit sich herumschleppt und vom Notenexamen träumt; […] Leer, der einen Vollbart trägt und große Vorliebe für Mädchen aus den Offizierspuffs hat; […] als vierter ich, Paul Bäumer. Alle vier neunzehn Jahre alt, alle vier aus derselben Klasse in den Krieg gegangen. (Remarque 8) The techniques are very different, but they nonetheless share an affinity in terms of narrative effect. Of special significance, the voice-over in this scene acts as an intermediary between the novel and the film. As Sarah Kozloff notes: “Adding voice-over narration to a film creates a fascinating dance between pose and actuality, word and images, narration and drama, voice and ‘voice’” (1). Just as in the epigram scene at the beginning of the film, the voice-over “reads” Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 285 the text from the novel; 4 only this time the viewer does not see any text on the screen and no unnecessary repetition of written and spoken words occurs. The text has been replaced by images, in this case by the faces of the soldiers. The voice-over, the images of the soldiers, and the seamless movement of the camera tracking forward and gliding from one character to another all work together in emulating the means through which the same characters are being introduced in Remarque’s novel. It should also be noted that the voice-over narration as a narrative film technique has its origins in literature. 5 As a cinematic tool, however, it fails to produce any narrative effect (just like the epigraph scene discussed above) if it does not work side by side with other filmic techniques, such as the mise-èn-scene and the camera movement among other things. Returning to the beginning of the graphic novel and the image discussed above (see image 4), we can readily conclude that the eight panels portraying some of the main and minor characters of the story occupy the major portion of the double splash page. Yet despite the multiple panels, there is no sequential storytelling in the traditional sense of the word since no “closure,” the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (McCloud 63), is required on the part of the reader to fill in gaps relating to movement or action between them. In other words, in spite of the “gutters,” the space between the panels, there are no traditional “cuts” between the panels that will force readers to “take two separate images and transform them into a single idea” (McCloud 66). We should also note that each panel depicting one of the soldiers has a caption beneath it that contains fragments of Remarque’s original text. The text itself introduces the characters (see image 4). Thus, the entire panel-sequence aligns much more closely to Mann’s film adaptation in terms of narration and less with Remarque’s source text. The spoken words performed by the voice-over in the film are replaced by written words in the graphic novel. Juxtaposing the two, the differences appear minimal. Just like the movement of the camera that leads the viewer’s eye from one face to the other while the voice-over provides additional information, so does the reader’s eye glide from one panel to the other on the surface of the page while reading the text beneath the panels. Consequently, the impact that Mann’s film adaptation seems to have had on Eickmeyer’s mode of storytelling in this particular scene is considerable. This reading illuminates a key example of one medium (comics) emulating and adapting narrative modes from another medium (film). Examining more closely the techniques found in Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation from 1930 for introducing the leading characters to the audience and the techniques Mann’s film utilizes to do the same leads to the realization that Mann’s adaptation is as equally affected by Milestone’s film adaption as is Eickmeyer’s graphic novel by Mann’s film. Unlike Remarque’s and Mann’s utilization of multiple time shifts and flashbacks, Milestone’s storyline appears 286 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos very linear and straightforward, which is incidentally a typical trait of films of that era. A military parade is the focal point of Milestone’s opening scene that viewers only get to see after the opening of a door by an elderly man who discusses with a maid the very positive, albeit falsely interpreted, outcome of the war. The gesture of the door being opened and the movement of the camera tracking forward and through the door resemble the opening of a book pointing to the novel from which the work springs. Just like the reader who dives into a fictive world by opening a book and reading the written words on its pages, so does the door in the film grant the viewer access to a realm that only exists within the confines of the screen. The door stands here as a metaphor for the perimeter, dimensions, and confines of the page on the one hand and the screen on the other within which the story unfolds. After a series of shots of the ongoing military parade, the camera slowly retreats from the exterior space of the parade to the interior space of a classroom, passing in the interim through the threshold of a window: a further visual representation of the screen’s outlines. The camera then cuts to and slowly zooms in on the teacher, Kantorek (played by Arnold Lucy), capturing his attempts to convince his young students to drop out of school and enlist in the German army. The mise-en-scène foregrounds Kantorek’s stature, the globe standing in front of him, and a quote from Homer’s Iliad that can be seen on the blackboard behind him. After a shot-reverse-shot between Kantorek and his classroom, Paul Bäumer (played by Lew Ayres), his classmates, and soon to be comrades are introduced to the audience through a series of close-ups. The sequence bears a striking similarity to Mann’s scene discussed in the previous paragraphs. No voice-over names the characters and reflects on their background here as was the case in Mann’s work. The close-ups themselves in Milestone’s film, however, serve the same purpose of introducing the characters to the audience through audiovisual means. In that regard, Milestone’s sequence relies more on visual clues and less on verbal elements when conveying information about the characters. The two dissolves that follow the first two close-ups of the pupils are a case in point. The close-ups on individual figures act as flashbacks, a cinematic technique not quite developed at that time and as such extremely rare in feature-length motion pictures. From a design standpoint, viewers should see them as fantasies on the part of the pupils. In the first close-up, the dissolve facilitates the smooth and gradual transition from one shot (the close-up of the pupil) to the other (the scene of his fantasy) supporting the assumption that the scene under consideration is in fact either a flashback or a fantasy. The door once again figures prominently. The fantasy scene itself 6 is completely silent; it conveys information solely through visual means and mainly through the mise-en-scène and the facial expressions and gesticulation of the actors; two characteristics among Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 287 the most distinctive qualities of the silent film era. Furthermore, the viewer can hear Kantorek’s voice in both scenes, where it acts less as a voice-over device and more as a bridge between the two scenes, thus enabling the viewer to make a connection between them. The second fantasy sequence is very similar to the one described above, revealing to the viewers familiar with the novel the identity of the character in question (Leer, der “große Vorliebe für Mädchen aus den Offizierspufffs hat”). We also recognize Joseph Behm when we see him silently break out into tears in the classroom. While the setting during the introduction of Paul Bäumer and his classmates and comrades is different in all three works, they all share an affinity in terms of how they introduce the characters to their respective audiences or readers. As Martin Tropp remarks in his study of film adaptations based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, previous adaptations of source texts can, at times, affect subsequent adaptations to a much higher degree than source texts: Can Mary Shelley’s vision be both faithfully and effectively rendered on film? Perhaps not. Perhaps the myth that has supplanted it and that will continue to infuse popular culture is the only way it can be rendered in a visual medium. […] Transformed by theater and film, Frankenstein has become so much a part of our culture that, paradoxically, her original story may not translate to film without losing its power. (74-75) The Frankenstein trope, a common and somewhat popular theme among adaptation studies critics (Garcia 223—42), is also relevant for the study of Eickmeyer’s Im Westen . Just like the body of Frankenstein’s “creature” that is assembled from various body parts belonging to more than one individual, so is Im Westen 288 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos an assemblage of fragments taken from a wide and varied range of other works including, as we saw, previous adaptations of the source text. Each one of those fragments that constitutes its body acts as a hidden panel within the surface of the page or as a window that enables us to regard other artworks and read them in conjunction with each other. While this might not be enough to justify the classification of “graphic novel,” the significant amount of graphic and filmic quotations that can be found on almost every page of the book do function as panels. The “gutter” is of course not visible, but we are, as readers, forced to build connections between the book and the works that Im Westen references. What began as Remarque’s “therapeutic attempt to cure depression” has become a standard text for not only understanding World War I, but also its impact on readers with various national histories (Barker and Last 33). Our close examination of Peter Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues reveals both the aesthetic and historical influence of this long tradition of artistic responses to World War I in literature, painting, and film. The fact that shots from Lewis Milestone’s well-known 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front were used in World War I documentary films because of their realistic presentation of war not only blurs the line between authenticity and creative license, but also speaks to the high likelihood that these images affect readers of Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues as much as the original text itself (Chambers). In fact, chief historians have characterized artistic reactions to World War I, which have been pivotal in establishing and steering perceptions of World War I and war in general in the United States and abroad, as “not a falsification of reality, but rather an imaginative version of it” (Hynes xi). As we have argued, Im Westen ’s intertextual narrative capability asserts itself in the fact that it reinterprets and subsequently incorporates representations of war in other media, such as visual art, photography, and film. Im Westen incorporates or visually cites examples from other media that contribute to the comics quality of Eickmeyer’s text, which consists of verbal and pictorial levels. Douglass Wolk aptly explains the medial differences between comics, film, and literature: “Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a film” (14). Austrian graphic artist Gerald Hartwig underscores the “betweenness” of graphic literature when he describes it as a Mittelding , or a medium that combines characteristics and the expressive potential of other media. The present reading opens a new line of critical discussion and one that expands upon the current reviews that focus on the lack of speech bubbles or sequential art. Eickmeyer himself admits that his graphic novel does not adhere to a “typische Bildfolge,” and he is aware of the criticism that he or his publisher has mislabeled Im Westen a graphic novel. When readers consider that the carefully selected Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 289 visual citations in this graphic literary work serve to articulate broader, more universal themes, such as the “lost generation’s” experience of being at war, and physical or mental survival (Wagener 12, 19), then Eickmeyer’s response to debates about his and his wife’s compliance with comics standards seems quite understandable: “Die Diskussion ist uns mittlerweile egal.” It is precisely this discussion, however, that has helped produce this first and only study of its kind that closely examines the graphic aesthetics of this graphic adaptation. Notes 1 Peter Hetzler in Hessische Lehrerzeitung . Quoted on the Splitter Verlag website for Eickmeyer’s Im Westen. 2 The anthologies Books in Motion , edited by Mireia Aragay, and Film Adaptation , edited by James Naremore, are a case in point. 3 Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation (1930) starts off with the same epigraph shortly after the opening credits. 4 There are of course some minor differences between Remarque’s text and what the voice-over narrates in the above discussed scene, but the adaptation remains very close to the source text while introducing the characters. There is also a shift in location and time. As opposed to both the novel and the comic book that start off after the fighting, the main characters are in the trenches at the beginning of the film awaiting anxiously the ensuing battle. 5 In her work Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film , Sarah Kozloff challenges the assumption that the voice-over in films is a technique taken directly from the medium of literature. 6 The boy faces the dilemma to please his father but sadden his mother by enlisting in the army. Works Cited Acheson, Charles. “Expanding the Role of the Gutter in Nonfiction Comics: Forged Memories in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde .” Studies in the Novel 47.3 (2015): 291—307. All Quiet on the Western Front . Dir. Lewis Milestone. Universal Pictures, 1930. All Quiet on the Western Front . Dir. Delbert Mann. Norman Rosemont Productions, 1979. Allen, Graham. Intertextuality . London and New York: Routledge. 2000. 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Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation . Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers UP . 2000. 54—76. Tropp, Martin. “Re-Creating the Monster: Frankenstein and Film.” Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Fiction to Film . Ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack. Bowling Green, OH : Bowling Green State U Popular P. 1999. Wagener, Hans. Understanding Erich Maria Remarque . Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991. Westwell, Guy. War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line . London: Wallflower Press, 2006. Williams, David. “Film and the Mechanization of Time in the Myth of the Great War Canon.” English Studies in Canada 41.2-3 (2015): 165—90. Witte, Tobias. “‘Im Westen nichts Neues’: Ist das noch ein Comic? Eickmeyers mutige Adaption des Klassikers.” texteundbilder 31 May 2014. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean . Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, 2007. Images Fig. 1. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 2. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 3. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 4. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 5. Still from Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). © Universal Pictures.