And he's also adapted Oscar Wilde's fairy tales into comics, as yet another long-running series of adaptations. (Well, I may mean "long-running" here to mostly mean "some time ago;" Wilde only wrote nine fairy tales and Russell adapted them, except for "The Fisherman and His Soul," into five books between 1992 and 2012.)
I haven't made a special effort to read the Wilde adaptations. I saw the fourth book, and covered it in a roundup, back in 2009, and probably read one or two others before then.
But reading projects are fun, and there's only five of these books, so I just went back to read 1992's first collection: Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: The Selfish Giant / The Star Child.
And these two stories were much more conventional and moralistic than I expected. They both come from that traditionally Victorian, very judgmental style of Christianity that assumes everything in the world is horrible and sinful and only The Power of Jesus provides any hope. Russell uses a lot of Wilde's prose and dialogue, which he does in a lot of his adaptations: he picks things, I think, where he loves the language and wants to showcase as much of that language in his art as possible. Luckily, Wilde's prose is famous for being amusing and well-formed; long chunks of god-bothering in the sanctimonious mode - which Wilde runs very close to, a lot of the time, here - are deadly dull, especially when the reader expects to read comics, not Tractarianism.
Anyway, both of these stories teach the same moral: be nice to other people, because they're probably Jesus (or otherwise important) and will curse you if you don't.
The Selfish Giant returns from a years-long holiday to find children have taken to playing in his garden. He kicks them out and builds a sturdy wall to keep them out. This of course means that Summer avoids his garden forevermore, leaving it racked by winter storms throughout the year. Until one oh-so-beautiful child - the reader will guess who He represents very quickly, as long as that reader has the requisite cultural background - melts the heart of the giant, who tears down the wall and gleefully watches the children play the rest of his long life.
The Star Child is found as an infant, wrapped in a golden cloth, in the woods at the site of a meteor's fall. (I suspect the set-up inspired Gaiman's Stardust, but the two stories go very different directions.) One of the woodcutters who discovered him adopts the baby, specifically against "we can't afford another mouth to feed" objections from both his partner and wife. The boy is gorgeous, but becomes a horrible, evil, selfish brat by the age of ten, the leader of a gang of similarly-aged hoodlums in this medieval town. A beggar woman appears in town then, saying she's been searching for her lost son, who was stolen away in those very woods, wrapped in that very cloth, exactly ten years ago. The boy of course denies his poor, ragged, ugly mother, and is cursed into looking frog-like. And then he's driven from town, since he's ugly now, and goes through various travails until he learns to give up everything to a leper, even at risk of his own death. Then he's restored to beauty and told that the old woman is a beautiful queen, the leper a handsome king, and he their son and heir. (But he dies young, in the xthkbye last sentence.)
I like Russell's art and Wilde's prose better than the stories here - both of those are assured and sophisticated and precise, while the stories are duller and vastly more obvious. These are very much Improving Stories, for anyone in the market for such. But they're told with a verve that hints that Improvement might not be quite as simple as it seems - though only a hint.
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