Emily Lauer (SUNY Suffolk County Community College)
Whether it be comics adaptations of classic plays, or celebrated graphic narratives that get adapted for the musical stage, the interplay between the stage and the comics page is rich and multi-directional, as both are visual narratives, with very different points of access and methods of meaning-making. The ill-fated Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark may not have much in common with a graphic novelization of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, but they share an attempt to grapple with the intersection of the two media formally. This panel seeks papers that explore adaptations from comics into theater, or from theater into comics. The papers might focus on medium specificity in each form; changes in status of high to low culture, or broad to niche appeal; any of the aspects of each “wave” of adaptation studies as posited by Thomas Leitch; or some other theoretical framework.