image: Professor Bad Trip, Il pasto nudo, Shake, Digital edition.
17 June 2026, 3:00 to 4:00 pm
at UGent Camelot room (3rd floor of the Blandijn).
This research investigates literary adaptations into comics and graphic novels within the dystopian genre, focusing on their aesthetic and cultural status. While film adaptations are often recognised as autonomous artistic works, comic adaptations continue to be viewed primarily as derivative versions of literary classics. This asymmetry raises important questions concerning both adaptation theory and the cultural legitimacy of comics.
The project aims to examine whether and how dystopian comic adaptations can be understood as aesthetically autonomous works, capable of generating meanings and forms that are not reducible to their source texts. In doing so, it revisits key issues in comics studies and adaptation theory, including the relationship between comics and literature, the artistic autonomy of the medium, the role of the graphic novel in processes of cultural legitimisation, and the tension between originality and convention in intermedial adaptation.