"The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg," the story by Twain, appeared in 1899 and was the title story of his 1900 collection. The version here, Mark Twain's The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, was adapted and drawn by Wander Antunes, with some small changes to bring modern readers in more easily, and translated into English for this edition by Benjamin Croze. (The book is silent about whether Antunes originally worked in Portuguese, which I assume is his native language, or French, the language of first publication.)
Antunes is mostly faithful to Twain's original: it's set in the same time-period, in the same small town renowned (mostly by itself) for its honesty, and Antunes uses a lot of Twain's prose for captions. He mostly diverges from the original by including Twain's characters Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as something like reader inserts or a muted Greek chorus, supposedly visiting this town (even though their ages completely don't work - they were boys before the Civil War, and this is the turn of the century) during the events of the story and learning about it from a minor character.
This somewhat softens the story: the point of "Hadleyburg" is that we the readers identify fully with the lying, self-justifying "prominent men" and don't have a clearly innocent and honest viewpoint to latch on to.
So how was Hadleyburg corrupted? An unnamed stranger had an unnamed offense in that town, and was petty or spiteful enough that, a year later, he devised a plan to shame the entire town because of it. He delivered a sack, supposedly containing a small fortune, to one of the prominent couples of the town, along with a note. The note explained that a stranger passed through Hadleyburg a year before, and was aided by one of the men of the town - but, sadly, the stranger does not know the man's name. He did, however, remember a piece of advice the Hadleyburg man gave him, which is written inside a second sealed envelope, for proof.
So the fortune will go to whichever Hadleyburg man can say he met the stranger, and repeat the advice he gave.
There are two wrinkles, though, that we as readers know. First, as is fairly obvious, the whole story is a lie: there was no helpful Hadleyburg man, and no one in town can remember the helpful saying that was never given. Second, the stranger sends letters to every one of the nearly-twenty prominent men of the town, giving them each the supposed advice, so they can all claim the fortune. (Or, of course, if they were actually honest, they would do no such thing.)
There is a big scene with the local preacher reading out all of the letters, which goes about as badly as it possibly could: all of the prominent men, save only the one who received the original sack - saved by the preacher for an unknown reason and mentally tormented because of it - have their letters read out, and are all revealed as liars and crooks when the stranger's explanation is reveled.
Even worse, the supposed sack of gold coins is full of worthless lead.
In Antunes' version, Tom and Huck leave town for happier places, having seen the whole thing, and the town (as in Twain's original) is humbled, becoming actually honest for the first time.
Antunes keeps this talky, mostly interior story lively, with a lot of great 19th-century-looking faces and good scene-setting - his pages tend to start as nine-panel grids and shift around to fit the action, though mostly staying as three equal tiers. The moral of the story is still as obvious as it ever was, maybe even more so as Antunes throws in some complete innocents to comment on the action and make it even clearer - he's making a book for an audience that probably doesn't see itself in the "prominent men" of a small town, unlike Twain.
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