In high school I first encountered the practice of taking older plays and recasting them into new social settings and surroundings. It had been practiced for quite some time, of course, but it never hit me that you could take Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors" and drop it into prohibition-era Chicago, or perform a modern-day "As You Like It" with the inhabitants of the Forest of Arden being clad in t-shirts and spandex biking shorts, and Duke Frederick becoming Duchesse Fredrique. So when I was looking through the vast number of new Dutch comics that Mars Import recently acquired, Tom Bouden's adaptation of "The Importance of Being Earnest" caught my eye. Bouden has turned Oscar Wilde's play into a graphic novel, only this one is set in the present day, and deals with four gentlemen rather then two men and two women.

Bouden takes very few other liberties with his edition of The Importance of Being Earnest; those who have seen or read some of Shakespeare's comedies will no doubt be familiar with a lot of the basic concepts. Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff both have secret "siblings" that no one really knows the truth of. Whenever Jack decides to head into town, he tells everyone that he's visiting his "wicked brother Ernest", and upon arriving goes under the identity of Ernest. Algernon, likewise, often escapes his social engagements by going to visit his "sick friend Bunbury". When Jack decides it's time to propose to Algernon's cousin Glenn, however, it sets in motion a series of misidentifications and engagements that takes quite some time to finish unraveling...

I had only the vaguest of familiarity with Wilde's play, but Bouden does a good job of keeping the feel of the original, as well as keeping it comprehensible. Often when prose or plays are transformed into sequential art, it's done almost with the assumption that people are familiar with the source material, and throw all introduction and exposition to the winds. That's not the case here; Bouden carefully introduces each of the main characters, pacing himself carefully to let the entire story unfold. Rather than jump directly into the plot with Jack and Al discussing Jack's plans to propose to Glenn, Bouden wisely lets the story unfold in accordance with the play, letting us meet Jack and Al as Wilde originally intended. The basic language is still the same as well; certainly, some words got changed (I'm pretty sure that Wilde's play didn't have the word "e-mail" in it, for instance!) but all of the acid wit and phrases of Wilde's that you hear quoted left and right are still intact. The story itself is a little silly, to be certain, but that's part of the charm. It's decidedly old-fashioned despite its modern-day settings, and when the worst aspect of a marriage proposal is that your parents weren't upper class enough, well, it's almost a breath of fresh air.

Bouden's art is extremely simple and effective. When I first saw it, my immediate thought was that it looked a bit like Herge's art on Tintin. It's got a very clean look to it, but don't mistake that for a lack of detail. It's to Bouden's credit that he is able to at the same time provide elaborate backgrounds, chiefly of Jack's manor home (both the interiors and exterior grounds). He's very clearly not skimping on the detail; his style itself is just very simple. One nice touch from Bouden is for several moments in The Importance of Being Earnest, Bouden visually interprets what some of the lines's double meanings are in the form of thought balloons. Rather than use words, though, he draws images of what the characters are really thinking about inside the balloons. It's a nice touch, and Bouden thankfully keeps from overusing it, letting the device remain fresh. My only real complaint is that in several of the pages, Glenn and Cecil manage to look amazingly similar; for most of the book, that's not a problem (they really don't look that alike!) but every once and a while I had to perform a double take to figure out who was talking.

I'd never encountered Bouden's work before, but clearly I'm going to have to start keeping an eye out for it in any future Mars Import shipments from Belgium! While this isn't the first time I'd encountered Wilde's works being adapted to comics (P. Craig Russell's The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde albums are also well worth seeking out), hopefully it's not the last; I think Bouden did an excellent job in showing that there's still life in Wilde's works. The Importance of Being Earnest is available from Mars Import.

Review by Greg McElhatton