Marvel gives Austen fans another serving

Admittedly, Marvel Comics and Jane Austen don’t sound like the most likely match.

But Marvel had a hit last year with its comic book adaptation of Austen’s beloved “Pride and Prejudice.” So now it’s adapting another Austen classic, “Sense and Sensibility.”

The first issue of Marvel’s five-issue “Sense & Sensibility” is scheduled to arrive in comic book shops May 26. Like the first adaptation, it’s written by Nancy Butler, a writer of historical romance novels.

Some Austen fans greeted the news last year of Marvel’s “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation with excitement; others were aghast.

“They were very resistant,” Butler said. But once those fans overcame their preconceived notions about comics and started reading the adaptation, they began to come around, she said.
“I got a lot of things that said, ‘I was quite surprised by how much I enjoyed it,’” Butler said.

Sales of the series and an ensuing hardcover collection surpassed Marvel’s expectations, she said. “They were so thrilled.”

Writing the “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation was Butler’s first foray into comics writing. Having that under her belt makes doing the second one easier, she said. But adapting “Sense and Sensibility” also offered some new challenges.

“Sense and Sensibility,” which was Austen’s first published novel, tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, who fall in love with two very different men. Unlike in “Pride and Prejudice,” which Butler says reads almost like a play, Austen does a lot of telling rather than showing in “Sense and Sensibility” — more exposition rather than scenes with dialogue. As a result Butler had to take the liberty of creating some scenes. Otherwise, she would have been stuck with pages full of captions.

“I haven’t gone rogue and made up things that aren’t implied in the story,” Butler promised loyal Austen fans, who she calls “sticklers for accuracy.”

Butler is also working with a different artist on “Sense & Sensibility.” Hugo Petrus was the artist on the “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation, and while Butler liked his work, there were some complaints from fans that the heroines in that work were portrayed as larger-than-life buxom beauties — basically “Marvel babes,” Butler said. Sonny Liew is illustrating “Sense & Sensibility,” and previews of his work have garnered positive reviews, she said.

“He’s got a softer style, more what I call a lyrical style,” she said. And he adopts an outright cartoon style when tackling “the grotesques” — those characters that you love to hate, as Butler describes them.

“Sense and Sensibility” is not a romp, Butler said. “These heroines spend most of the book pretty broken-hearted.”

So she welcomes injecting a bit of playfulness.

“It could be a slog, it really could, and we don’t want it to be that.”