We chat with Josh O'Neill and Gideon Kendall about finishing a dream held by one of the medium's masters.
Welcome to Creator Corner, our recurring interview series in which we chat with the coolest and most thought-provoking creators in the industry. In this entry, we're conversing with Josh O'Neill and Gideon Kendall about Harvey Kurtzman's Marley's Ghost. Listen to the unedited audio HERE.
Over seventy years ago, master cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman dreamed of adapting Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol into one massive graphic novel before the term "graphic novel" was even coined. He got to work on it, roughing out some pages, but couldn't find a publisher with the imagination to make it a reality. The new century turned over, and years continued to whiz past, but along came writer Josh O'Neill and artist Gideon Kendall to rectify comic book history.
O'Neill and Kendall sifted through Kurtzman's notes, drawings, and layouts. They had access to a page attempted by another comic book legend, Jack Davis. They plunged into the numerous film and television adaptations and found a reason for them to create one more. What was that reason?
We explore the answer with the two collaborators. Harvey Kurtzman adored the Charles Dickens story but was most compelled by its creepier, scarier elements. He wanted to turn the dial on that vibe, exaggerate the dread, and connect the horror to the present. Why did he stop? We get into those practical and emotional reasons, too.
Whatever the case, Josh O'Neill and Gideon Kendall have righted a wrong. The legendary cartoonist's dream lives in Harvey Kurtzman's Marley's Ghost, the new original graphic novel from Ablaze Publishing. It's a privilege to hold the book in your hands, a thing that should not be but does exist because of the passion of those who came after Kurtzman.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Harvey Kurtzman and his Marley's Ghost Dream
Brad: Lisa and I love every iteration of A Christmas Carol...well, maybe we don't love every iteration, but we certainly watch every iteration. Why does the world need another one?
Josh O'Neill: I feel like the world does not need more examples of A Christmas Carol, there have been so many. And I think the reason that we did this project was not so much out of an urge to create another version of A Christmas Carol as much as it was to fulfill this weird and very specific vision that Harvey Kurtzman had of A Christmas Carol. Which was sort of his own unique take on it. Which really, I think hearken back to the sort of Victorian tradition of Christmas ghost stories. There's this British Victorian tradition of people sitting around the fire on Christmas telling creepy stories to each other. A Christmas Carol is very much an entry in that tradition, but in many adaptations, it gets kind of lost because it's so cozy, heartwarming, and lovely. The Kurtzman version certainly has all that energy too, but also - he retitled it Marley's Ghost. I think part of the reason for that is that he wanted to bring out some of the haunted aspects of it.
It was exciting for us to try to explore what he was trying to do 70-some years ago with this totally unique take on the material. It's interesting to revisit this story and realize why it's been adapted so many times. It's so relevant to everything that's happening right now in the world. It's still so moving after all these years, after seeing it so many times. So yeah, it was just an interesting experience for us to look at it through the lens of these two different creators. We had Kurtzman on one hand, and Dickens on the other hand. I don't know who the third ghost would be exactly, but they were guiding us well, I think.
Gideon Kendall: I think there's a reason that he called it Marley's Ghost and not A Christmas Carol. And I think there's a reason that he stopped working on the project. I mean, there's two reasons he stopped. One is he couldn't find a publisher, and he probably was disheartened by that. I'm sure he was. But the other reason is that I think what interested him mostly from the point of view of being the artist who was going to retell this story was the ghost part. It was the creepy supernatural part of the story and the fear and the humor that's in that part of the story. And it's when he gets to the more mundane parts of the story, like the Christmas parties and the flashback stuff that his work starts to get a little sketchier, and then he eventually stopped working on it.
I think that stuff was less interesting to him. You think about the kind of stuff that he was working on at the time back in the fifties, it was horror comics and humor stuff. And so I'm sure if a publisher had come along and given him the opportunity to finish it, he would've plowed through with it. But I think there's a reason that he gave up. But I think he called it Marley's Ghost because it's the ghost part that, to him, was the most fun and the most interesting.
So, we tried to lean into that for sure. Back to your original question of why another one, don't know if I have a great answer for that, but I do know that the incredible back catalog of different versions was something that Josh and I really explored. There are so many movies and TV versions and all this stuff that we kind of went back through them all and tried to pick and choose, because there's so many different things that people tried. Unlike A Tale of Two Cities and some of his other books. Some of his books are perfect, and A Christmas Carol isn't perfect. The character arc, his transformation is perfect, but there are loose ends and tangents and little asides that don't go anywhere. And I think that's because he was writing it very quickly and wasn't it being published in serial?
Josh O'Neill: Yeah.
Gideon Kendall: So, I don't think he necessarily figured out - I don't think he perfected the bullet points or the outline of the story. I think that's part of the reason that when you see the movies, you're like, oh, there's all these different things that they were trying to mix things around. And we took a little bit from every version that we watched.
Harvey Kurtzman, Maryley's Ghost, and Necessary Adaptation
Brad: And to answer my own question, even if nobody asked-
Gideon Kendall: That would be better because clearly we didn't really answer your question.
Brad: No, you did. But I have an ego, so every question I ask I have an answer for. And I think it's a question that we don't ask Hamlet. We don't ask that about A Midsummer Night's Dream. I find adaptation to be one of the most intriguing aspects of storytelling, to see what people add, subtract, and interpret. That's like the thrill of it for me. It's why I love Gus Van Sant's Psycho, even though so many people really despise it. Because once you cast Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, you utterly change the story.
Josh O'Neill: Well, it's also something that's just been adapted so much it's almost like a song, like a standard. Every great singer tries certain songs, and I feel like A Christmas Carol is a little bit like that. There's just been adaptations of it that have come from every which way and every direction, and so many different great filmmakers, writers, and creative people of all different kinds.
Gideon Kendall: You're not going to surprise anyone with a version of A Christmas Carol. Everyone knows where it's going from the moment it starts. So what are you going to bring to it? How are you going to surprise people enough here and there along the way that you're not just rubber-stamping this thing?
Brad: And Kurtzman's desire to embrace the haunted aspects, the horror aspects of it feels extremely natural to me. The first time I reconsidered A Christmas Carol was when I was in high school and I was reading William F. Nolan's How to Write Horror Fiction, and he begins that book by describing A Christmas Carol as one of the best horror stories ever.
Gideon Kendall: Really?
Josh O'Neill: That's interesting.
Brad: And that was when I was like, "Oh, I'm going to read A Christmas Carol." It allowed me to embrace it in my teen self as like, "This is a horror story, it's cool."
Gideon Kendall: Oh, I'm going to look up that book, that's super interesting.
Brad: I believe it is called just "How to Write Horror Fiction."
Josh O'Neill: I'm writing it down.
Brad: In the nineties, it was published by Writer's Digest, I believe. It's been 30 years since I've read it, but...
Gideon Kendall: That's really interesting, because there was a little bit of a challenge with it, because everyone knows it and it's been around forever, and you just sort of take it for granted. It's like the old chair in your living room. You don't ever really stop to consider it. But then we got to really dive deep into it and spend so much time with it and check out all the different versions and get a new appreciation for it because we got to spend so much time with it.
Brad: One of the things that's fascinating about Marley's Ghost, it was his attempt to do one of the first graphic novels. And even though it was aborted, Kurtzman's desire to do a proper literary thing within this field at that time is critical.
Gideon Kendall: At a time when it had no respect at all. Yeah, yeah.
Josh O'Neill: He was too ahead of his time; I think people weren't ready for it. Publishers were like, "What? No, that's not what a comic is," but it is what a comic would become.
Unpacking Harvey Kurtzman's Marley's Ghost
Brad: So, take us through looking at those pages of art and his extensive notes. What was it like sifting through that stuff and then ultimately interpreting it?
Gideon Kendall: It was terrifying. That's what it was.
Brad: Yeah.
Gideon Kendall: This was my first graphic novel, and I think my first paid work in comics, so I was definitely experiencing a lot of imposter syndrome and just worry. And working with Josh made it a lot easier. We had so much fun sitting down with the original text and looking at the Kurtzman pages. We both watched the different movie versions and everything on our own and made these notes.
The process of making the book was so much fun that it took my mind off the discomfort I was feeling internally. It made it a lot easier for me. And then it was also nice in the way that he has these pages that were fully realized, but then the fact that they get sort of sketchier and sketchier until there's just some thumbnails, and then there's nothing. It was like having training wheels on a bicycle.
I had laid out pages to work from, and then it just sort of peters out. And so it kind of got me going down the hill. By the time all his sketches ran out, I felt like I was in a good rhythm with it. It was also helpful that he had had Jack Davis do a sample page. That was very helpful because my work is much more in the Jack Davis realm of cartooning. I could never be as simple and elegant as Kurtzman. I could never distill things down to the level that he did. But having that Jack Davis page as being like, "Okay, well, maybe it's okay for me to be an interloper here." Jack Davis isn't around anymore, so I'm an okay substitute here. We just got into it and solved these problems in the text because Dickens had never imagined the story being told in this medium. So there were difficult sequences to conceive of as a comics page, but again, just working with Josh was a blast. We just had fun. It was a blast working on it.
Josh O'Neill: Oh, it was so much fun. And yeah, I think your training wheels analogy is really good because he really does fade out so slowly. You almost don't notice by the time you're like, "Well, by the time you get to those final layouts, they're so loose, they're not even that helpful at that point."
Gideon Kendall: Well, even the last one is the start of the party, and I think all he did was write, "In they came."
Josh O'Neill: Yeah, yeah. Some things he just wrote.
Gideon Kendall: And that's what we did. We just did that. We turned that into a splash page of a bunch of people dressed up, going into a party and starting to dance. We were basically following his instructions. You kind of got the sense that he was throwing up his hands there.
Josh O'Neill: He was like, I'm not going to draw 40 ball gowns in this panel!
Gideon Kendall: Like, I'm done with this.
Harvey Kurtzman, Marley's Ghost, and the Best Christmas Carol
Brad: Having experienced all these different interpretations of A Christmas Carol, do you have a favorite adaptation?
Gideon Kendall: For setting the tone, the visual tone of the book, the black and white version from the 50s is the definitive one. That was the one that I looked at for how to compose my panels. We did the book in color because we knew it would be more appealing in general that way, but the darkness and the compositions and just really getting the feel of the story and the feel of Victorian London, that's the one. There's a later version that's not so great. I think it was a made-for-TV version, and the lighting was terrible, but that was actually great for me.
Because the lighting was so bad and wrong, it didn't feel like Victorian England at all, but the costumes were easy to see, which was a version that I could freeze-frame. Because it's easy to find reference for the front of things, but finding reference for the backs of traditional Victorian clothing, the only way to do that is to be able to freeze-frame a film. You're not going to find those pictures online. So that was very helpful for me.
Josh O'Neill: Yeah, I also liked many of the ones that capture some of the comedy of A Christmas Carol, which sometimes gets left out of some of the adaptations. It's a very funny book. Dickens is just a very funny writer, and he wrote books that are primarily funny, but even his very serious books are filled with comedy. The Muppet adaptation is one of my absolute favorites.
Brad: There you go. Yes!
Josh O'Neill: That's like a classic to me. And I think one of the ones that's most inspiring-
Gideon Kendall: I based all my character designs on the Muppet version.
Josh O'Neill: I also love, from when I was a kid, I loved Scrooged, the Bill Murray one.
Brad: Yeah.
Josh O'Neill: That one for us was a big source of inspiration, specifically for the third act, the Ghost of Christmas Future, which I felt more so than any of the other adaptations I saw - It captured the hellishness of that sequence and the demonicness of that ghost. I saw that as a kid; I was probably eight or something like that. Even though it's a comedy movie, I was genuinely scared of that part.
Brad: Yeah, same.
Josh O'Neill: And that really imprinted on me that the Ghost of Christmas Future should be genuinely scary. And I think that's one of the things that Gideon did most wonderfully in this adaptation. That's my favorite sequence from the book - The Ghost of Christmas Future. It really is like this trip to hell. And Gideon brought that to life in such an intense and beautiful way.
Brad: Yeah, it's always the scene that I'm anticipating the most.
Josh O'Neill: It's also the scene that I'm saddest we never got to see Kurtzman do anything with because I think he would've really come to life in that section also.
Marley's Ghost is now available from Ablaze. And don't forget, you can listen to this unedited conversation on the CBCC Patreon.