Broken Frontier

A unique, historical science-fiction re-imagining, SD’s Antigone is easily the most accessible and nearly the most poignant adaptation of the play ever crafted.

As any high school graduate or self-taught fellow might be acquainted, Antigone is the direct follow-up to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, in which the fates of the four offspring of Oedipus’ incestuous union with his mother are chronicled. The two boys, Polyneices and Eteocles, war with each other for the right to the throne, a battle that claims both their lives. Their uncle, Creon, the next in line as king and therefore the currently acting king after the brothers’ double-death, quickly sides with one sibling over the other and proclaims that Polyneices will be granted a proper burial, but that Eteocles will suffer an unceremonious death – left above ground to become carrion for the birds. By royal decree, any who attempt to bury Eteocles will be convicted of treason. Enter: the two girl children of Oedipus – Antigone and Ismene – who conspire, out of sheer sisterly love, to properly inter their politically abandoned brother’s corpse, the consequences be damned. What follows is tragedy at its most eloquent.

The above is a basic breakdown of the play, and it’s also the story insofar as this adaptation by writer David Hopkins is concerned. Plot-wise, nothing is altered from the source material, yet what Hopkins has altered is just this side of brilliant. The setting is still ancient Greece, yet it’s a Greece littered with – at first glance – random anachronisms such as televisions, guns, three-piece business suits, and modern facial fashion piercings (though the less said about the anthropomorphic goat-guards, the better). From the first few pages the odd placement of these seemingly misplaced items draws the reader firmly in, establishing an instant level of curiosity even when entering a supposedly familiar narrative ground. As the tale progresses, the answer to why these 20th century concepts are drawn into pre-A.D. times is effortlessly understood – the play, its themes, and its characters are timeless, universal, and what better way to illustrate this than via the stirring of the ancient and new into a naturally complimentary mix?

The televisions and the suits and the guns and the nose-studs demonstrate how accurately Antigone’s central cast and core themes reflect the problems and mores of modern life. Each character is immediately recognizable as their modern counterpart, be it the hyperbolizing politician, the posturing, violent male youth, or the girl whose authentic morals are buried beneath an unbreakable façade of protective anger. Hopkins doesn’t try to update the message of Antigone, or bastardize it into some more hot-topic focused variation thereof, and the small touches he does twist are perfectly suited to drive home why the story doesn’t need any such update: it’s relevant – horrifically, terrifyingly relevant, even today, perhaps especially today with the common man’s steady detachment and disassociation with politics and its indecipherable methods of operation.

What comes as the only flaw in Hopkins’ vision is the inconsistency of updated dialogue. He chose to lift some lines direct from classic English translations of the play, yet most of the book is merely his own dialogue, his own translation. While such a mix could work – and it more or less does – the scheme with which he chooses to use other translators’ stiff, formal meter and his own informal lines is loosey-goosey and without obvious pattern. I would have liked to have seen the more poetic lines used only by specific characters, or in specific situations (i.e. during political speeches or official decrees), but instead the final result comes across as the writer tossing in a few lines that he specially liked and using little judgment or craft otherwise.

As for the art by Tom Kurzanski – it’s perfect. Once I was able to tear my eyes off the cover (an image that should go down in comic book history as one of the most attractive frontispieces ever published), I was greeted with page after page of dark, jagged illustrations that radiated subdued power while presenting a fluid dynamism of ever-present action. Kurzanski’s work is subversively commanding, using an overall cartoon style that manages to convey far more honest emotion than the most cinéma vérité style artists could otherwise accomplish, and it suits the modern-classical hybrid world of Silent Devil’s Antigone faultlessly.

Hopkins and Kurzanski’s Antigone does for Sophocles what Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet did for Shakespeare – it not only brings the classic story to a modern audience, but kicking and screaming into the modern world as well, spotlighting how faultlessly the tale fits our troublous times and how effortlessly it can be enjoyed and understood when lifted away from its long outdated, metered prose format. It suffers trivially due to lack of solid craft conceit (too many ideas and artistic flourishes with not enough rhyme and reason to sufficiently cement it), but otherwise there is not anywhere to be found a better translation. I call it such because that’s what it is – not an adaptation, in the end, but a translation, from words and ideas that connect only transversely to our present day concerns, to words and ideas that adamantly and obviously do. Antigone is a superior work that bridges the gap between comic books and literature; they’re one and the same, if created and allowed to be such.