Graphic Novel Review: The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation by Gareth Brookes

Reviewed by Deborah Tomaras

 Gareth Brookes. The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation. SelfMadeHero, 2025. US $19.99. ISBN: 9781914224270. https://selfmadehero.com/books/the-compleat-angler-a-graphic-adaptation

        

    English comics creator Gareth Brookes is known for art comics using experimental techniques, such as the crayon-rendered A Thousand Coloured Castles, as well as The Dancing Plague, which examines the 1518 historical phenomenon through pyrography and embroidered panels. In The Compleat Angler, Brookes creatively revisits the past in comics form, this time via linocut prints and ink on bamboo paper.

     As a work of art, the comic is stunning. The weaving together of sharp linocut and dreamy ink-on-bamboo mimics the undulations of a river and the movement of the text. More meditative sections of Walton's work—poetry, philosophy, musings—are illustrated using ink on wrinkled and borderless bamboo pages. Delicate smudging, and wordless panels, highlight the slower-paced and contemplative nature of the passages.

    The comic flows between these contemplative sections and more straightforward descriptive passages discussing fish and angling, where animals move sinuously across and between crisp three-color linocut panels, the traversing of gutters emphasizing their dynamism. A curious compression of human figures within the panels creates a rough size equivalence between people and animals depicted, highlighting the interconnectedness between human beings and the environment that Brookes foregrounds in his Preface to the comic.

     In all, the art style and pacing of the comic ably convey the artist's vision of The Compleat Angler as pacifist contemplation, a calming salve in turbulent political times. Brookes also emphasizes Walton's environmental argument against those who damage nature in service of profit—another timely contemporary issue. The artist turns Walton's ecological statement into direct environmental activism, donating ten percent of the book's profits to the British charity River Action.

    As a "remix, a celebration of Walton's book, or an elaborate fanzine," per Brookes' Preface, the comic works. As a literary adaptation, however, the reader is left with questions. Brookes never specifies which edition of Walton's work is being adapted. Certain sections, like an observation that Romans consider the eel "the Helena of their feasts," seem to point to later versions, as that phrase doesn't appear in the first edition. But it's difficult to pin down, particularly because the adaptation is similarly opaque as to where and why historical language has been retained. The artist specifies in the Preface that "some of [the] original, unusual spelling" (but presumably not all) was kept: why daintie, but not eele? Brookes also "abridged the book comprehensively and altered its structure entirely;" as with the Ship of Theseus, it's uncertain whether the text is still The Compleat Angler after all the alterations, or a different book entirely.

    Conversely, the retention of Walton's original pronouns for animals is perhaps too historical—and problematic—for the contemporary reader. Brookes keeps Walton's masculine pronouns for most animals, purportedly to highlight both the antiquated feel of the text and "the sense of respectful harmony" between people and animals, per the Preface. However, that harmony is decidedly and only masculine. Animals receiving feminine pronouns uniformly conform to moralizing stereotypes of womanhood held during the seventeenth century. The otter is a gluttonous and unnatural despoiler of nature. The raven callously abandons her hatchlings in a later section that again couples women with the unnatural. The female carp "put[s] on a seeming coyness" before breeding with multiple male carp at once; her behavior is contrasted to the courtly male carp guarding and assisting her at the end of their encounter. The sole virtuous feminine animal, the lark, ascends to the heavens while singing, presumably due to her piety and purity. In an adaptation where the artist freely acknowledges taking "great liberties with the original text" in the Preface, one wonders why this potentially beneficial textual change was overlooked.

     Despite questions about the comic as an adaptation, however, it is, in its own right, an enjoyable, beautiful and meditative work. Don't expect it to be the complete Compleat Angler; as Brookes writes in the Preface, the comics adaptation "is in no way intended as a substitute for the original." Read it instead for the peacefulness, the prints, and the pike.

A version of this review will appear in either IJOCA 27-1 or 27-2.