Stripping H.C. Andersen. Peter Madsen’s Historien om en mor (or, what a graphic novel adaptation can do that its literary source cannot)

This article addresses the transposition of H.C. Andersen’s literary production to comics and graphic novels; a vast, though little explored, field of research. It furnishes a brief overview of the work done by comic art creators in approaching the adaptation of Andersen, and proceeds to analyse Historien om en mor, Peter Madsen’s 2004 graphic novel adaptation of Andersen’s Historien om en Moder from 1848. As Madsen’s version is predominantly visual, employing images and sequences rather than words in the re-telling of the fairy tale, the investigation is presented as a semiotic analysis drawing on the tools provided by Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007; ed. orig. Système de la bande dessinée, 1999). Categories scrutinised as meaning makers include gridding, braiding, page layout, and the handling of the dimension of time, with the ultimate aim of describing how the media affordances of comics, in the hands of a true craftsman, add depth and complexity to the re-narration of Andersen’s original.