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alibi_shopI "adapted" Jack London's disease-apocalypse novella "The Scarlet Plague" in 2017 for Lauren Davis's and Stephenny Godfrey's anthology Sci-Fi San Francisco. The quote marks around "adapted" are because the novella has about 20,000 words, but the comic has about 400 words and entirely leaves out the main action of the story. It's now online here, so I thought I might talk about it and its source material a little.
London's little book combines a solid adventure yarn, of a kind that I think hadn't been attempted often before (there had certainly been other "disease wipes out most of the human race" tales, but he really gets into the action thriller aspect of people trying to escape from cities and the survivors fighting for dominance), with a frame story that's very quiet and melancholy and reads much more like the style of later post-apocalyptic science fiction that doesn't have Mad Max or mutants in it. At the same time, he couldn't resist stuffing that frame story full of fanciful ideas about the shiny ultra-modern world of 2013, as his protagonist "Granser"* attempts to explain them to illiterate children in the ruins of 2073. He puts a fair amount of effort into setting up a futuristic world only to immediately knock it down. But there's a clever blurring of the distinction between 2013 being ultra-modern to a 1912 reader and 1912 being ultra-modern to a 2073 hunter-gatherer, since London's description of how agriculture works ("a few men got the food for many")—and the exploitation in that system—is clearly a commentary on the present and a statement that progress doesn't always mean real change. His future world is brought down by a random disease, but you get the sense that maybe we had it coming.
I didn't feel like adapting the middle portion of the book that actually depicts the disaster, because that part was so influential that we've more or less seen it many times since. The comic is basically just about old Granser trying to explain what his life in our future (I mean Jack London's readers' future, our past) used to be like, which may or may not be accurate. To that end, all of the "futuristic" visuals were based on magazine and newspaper stuff from 1900-1912 speculating about what the coming century would be like, especially in the Bay Area: future airplanes were going to be like biplanes, but more so; there were three or four other East Bay Bridges that might have been built; the Oakland waterfront was supposed to be built out with a lot of landfill; and at one point after the 1906 SF earthquake, someone was lobbying for a big Classical Roman development on top of Twin Peaks. Anything that Jack London couldn't possibly have anticipated, I tried not to draw (so for instance Frank Lloyd Wright's East Bay Bridge is not in there).
You might think that the jello salad depicted on page 4 is anachronistic, but in fact that particular culinary technology was invented in 1904. The Converse-type canvas shoe on the same page is more of a stretch, since although Converse rubber-soled shoes date back to 1910, that style probably didn't appear until 1917.
The other visual quote on page 4 is of a very widely reproduced photo of farm workers in Oxnard, CA during the sugar beet strike of 1903, which London surely would've followed; I couldn't find any mention of who took it. Oxnard has a special place in comics history as well.
The most interesting thing about "The Scarlet Plague" (the novella) that doesn't involve its genre elements is the very ambiguous way that London's class consciousness shows through. The main representative of the working class in it is the nameless "Chauffeur", who's a horrible brute; London plays up how the breakdown of society will allow uncouth jerks like that to rise up and enslave their betters, portraying the Chauffeur in exactly the way a paranoid aristocrat would talk about the proles. But Granser, who was a very sheltered upper-class intellectual for the first part of his life, isn't particularly sympathetic either and it's clear that we're getting all this filtered through his point of view. Individual people in this story are all pretty sad cases who don't behave nobly under pressure. The farm laborers who "got the food for many"—whom Granser describes as if he never gave a thought to that injustice, and still isn't exactly acknowledging it,* because he's so focused on how much less comfortable his life has become—are where London's sympathies lie, even though they never appear as characters in the story at all. And that, I think, gets back to why this has to be a science-fiction story: London wants you to ooh and ahh for a while at things like the future airplanes that go 200 miles an hour... before he slips the knife in and reminds you that that shiny world, like our world, derives part of its strength from something that's not much better than slavery.
The oddest thing about "The Scarlet Plague" is London's idea that the poetry of George Sterling was something for the ages. He wasn't alone in this—Ambrose Bierce thought so too—but I have to say I could barely get through Sterling's cosmic fantasy piece "The Testimony of the Suns", the source of the line "the fleeting systems lapse like foam" that Granser repeats twice. London doesn't mention Sterling by name, but has the omniscient narrator say that the line is "evidently a quotation" (as if anyone in this future Stone Age would ever describe something as a quotation), which seems like his way of prodding the reader to go look it up (easier said than done in those days). It's pretty clunky, but it's also kind of charming that he decided to name-drop a local guy he liked—rather than having some lines from a famous pop song of his time (maybe an Al Jolson or Enrico Caruso number) be remembered by future barbarians, the way later post-apocalyptic tales would do all too often.
London's little book combines a solid adventure yarn, of a kind that I think hadn't been attempted often before (there had certainly been other "disease wipes out most of the human race" tales, but he really gets into the action thriller aspect of people trying to escape from cities and the survivors fighting for dominance), with a frame story that's very quiet and melancholy and reads much more like the style of later post-apocalyptic science fiction that doesn't have Mad Max or mutants in it. At the same time, he couldn't resist stuffing that frame story full of fanciful ideas about the shiny ultra-modern world of 2013, as his protagonist "Granser"* attempts to explain them to illiterate children in the ruins of 2073. He puts a fair amount of effort into setting up a futuristic world only to immediately knock it down. But there's a clever blurring of the distinction between 2013 being ultra-modern to a 1912 reader and 1912 being ultra-modern to a 2073 hunter-gatherer, since London's description of how agriculture works ("a few men got the food for many")—and the exploitation in that system—is clearly a commentary on the present and a statement that progress doesn't always mean real change. His future world is brought down by a random disease, but you get the sense that maybe we had it coming.
I didn't feel like adapting the middle portion of the book that actually depicts the disaster, because that part was so influential that we've more or less seen it many times since. The comic is basically just about old Granser trying to explain what his life in our future (I mean Jack London's readers' future, our past) used to be like, which may or may not be accurate. To that end, all of the "futuristic" visuals were based on magazine and newspaper stuff from 1900-1912 speculating about what the coming century would be like, especially in the Bay Area: future airplanes were going to be like biplanes, but more so; there were three or four other East Bay Bridges that might have been built; the Oakland waterfront was supposed to be built out with a lot of landfill; and at one point after the 1906 SF earthquake, someone was lobbying for a big Classical Roman development on top of Twin Peaks. Anything that Jack London couldn't possibly have anticipated, I tried not to draw (so for instance Frank Lloyd Wright's East Bay Bridge is not in there).
You might think that the jello salad depicted on page 4 is anachronistic, but in fact that particular culinary technology was invented in 1904. The Converse-type canvas shoe on the same page is more of a stretch, since although Converse rubber-soled shoes date back to 1910, that style probably didn't appear until 1917.
The other visual quote on page 4 is of a very widely reproduced photo of farm workers in Oxnard, CA during the sugar beet strike of 1903, which London surely would've followed; I couldn't find any mention of who took it. Oxnard has a special place in comics history as well.
The most interesting thing about "The Scarlet Plague" (the novella) that doesn't involve its genre elements is the very ambiguous way that London's class consciousness shows through. The main representative of the working class in it is the nameless "Chauffeur", who's a horrible brute; London plays up how the breakdown of society will allow uncouth jerks like that to rise up and enslave their betters, portraying the Chauffeur in exactly the way a paranoid aristocrat would talk about the proles. But Granser, who was a very sheltered upper-class intellectual for the first part of his life, isn't particularly sympathetic either and it's clear that we're getting all this filtered through his point of view. Individual people in this story are all pretty sad cases who don't behave nobly under pressure. The farm laborers who "got the food for many"—whom Granser describes as if he never gave a thought to that injustice, and still isn't exactly acknowledging it,* because he's so focused on how much less comfortable his life has become—are where London's sympathies lie, even though they never appear as characters in the story at all. And that, I think, gets back to why this has to be a science-fiction story: London wants you to ooh and ahh for a while at things like the future airplanes that go 200 miles an hour... before he slips the knife in and reminds you that that shiny world, like our world, derives part of its strength from something that's not much better than slavery.
The oddest thing about "The Scarlet Plague" is London's idea that the poetry of George Sterling was something for the ages. He wasn't alone in this—Ambrose Bierce thought so too—but I have to say I could barely get through Sterling's cosmic fantasy piece "The Testimony of the Suns", the source of the line "the fleeting systems lapse like foam" that Granser repeats twice. London doesn't mention Sterling by name, but has the omniscient narrator say that the line is "evidently a quotation" (as if anyone in this future Stone Age would ever describe something as a quotation), which seems like his way of prodding the reader to go look it up (easier said than done in those days). It's pretty clunky, but it's also kind of charming that he decided to name-drop a local guy he liked—rather than having some lines from a famous pop song of his time (maybe an Al Jolson or Enrico Caruso number) be remembered by future barbarians, the way later post-apocalyptic tales would do all too often.
