Stephen King’s The Stand Book 1: Captain Trips
Stephen King’s The Stand Book 1: Captain Trips, Adapted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa & Mike Perkins, Marvel
AUTHORS DON'T come much bigger than Stephen King. however, have never read a complete book by him. I’ve started and been totally impressed by how he is able to describe characters visually as if he were observing them as three-dimensional flesh and blood and then get underneath their skin to reveal their inner being. That he appeared to do that with every walk-on character and proceed to tell their life story up to that point had a bad habit of making me forget the actual book’s plot, and so I could never finish a book. Millions disagree. And maybe I just picked the wrong books to try out.
The Stand was first published as a novel in 1978, revised and updated in various editions since, and adapted into a TV series during the 90s. This millennium saw Marvel adapt it into comic form, its obvious popularity has found it collected into a series of albums, or graphic novels, gathering several issues of the series behind sturdier covers.
Captain Trips is the first such collection and is the name given to a military-created virus that due to a security breakdown is let loose, spreading across the breadth of the United States in no time at all, decimating a good 90% of the population and livestock. This is a story then, of its survivors, their attempts to discover each other and so by due process find themselves (if they don’t die themselves along the way). The title also tends to make one consider Peter Fonda’s Captain America character in Easy Rider and so that journey-travelled scenario is reinforced on a subliminal level.
And so it begins: assorted characters are introduced, and surprise, surprise their back story is outlined for us, each of their personal highpoints and major tragedies placed neatly before us, leaving us wandering how the events to come may change them. For me, it’s the same problem I’ve had before with getting to grips with King’s writing style.
But then, I don’t know how much is King and how much is by story adapter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s interpretations. Certainly there’s an open televised feel to the proceedings and that’s the industry the latter apparently works in mostly. Visually, Mike Perkins avoids flashy panel arrangements and opts for straightforward storytelling; since marketing would assume most readers to be King fans first, and comic fans secondary that’s a solid basis to work from, and with well drawn images with semi-photo referenced backgrounds for city scenes it works, and for the most part the modern American comics penchant for widescreen storytelling is kept in check. The colouring blends well, the lettering could be larger.
Modern comics take an awful long time to get to the point but there’s the possibility this adaptation actually shortcuts the characters’ back stories so that’s a plus for me. The book concludes for us with a small batch of potentially interesting characters, some not nice guys, and a fair amount of intrigue as to what will happen within the second collection.
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