It’s great loved the background of how the story came about, very into the art style. Dark unsettling but keeps you hooked to see where the story is going, very different but interesting characters.

Cool Joker origin story (sort of).

An outrageously grotesque and compelling adaptation of Victor Hugo's oft-overlooked novel of the same name. One gets the sense that Hine and Company created a work that is superior to the original here, in their story of a deformed man, the blind woman he loves, the charaltan who looks after them, and a cruel, unjust world that refuses to let them fully fit in anywhere. The Joker may have been inspired by the character of Gwynplaine, but the Clown Prince of Comedy never broke our hearts quite like this.

Oh my, do I love this book… I don’t even know where to begin with reviewing it, because there’s so much stuff in there. Perhaps with a word of warning: this is not an easy book to read. It’s huge, the descriptions can feel long, useless and drawn out at time, but just like other writers who produced door-stoppers of amazing literature (I’m thinking Dickens, Tolstoy and al.), Hugo created novels that are infinitely rewarding. And I promise you, everything ties together in the end.

This is the story of Gwynplaine, a horribly disfigured orphan: is mouth has been cut on each side, giving him a permanent, chilling smile. He finds, on a cold winter night, a blind infant girl, still curled up in the arms of the mother who died of cold and starvation somewhere in southern England. He rescues her, and gets rescued in his turn by Ursus, a wandering carnie of sorts, who lives alone in his caravan with his pet wolf, Homo. He adopts both children and they form a modest but happy family for fifteen years, performing in carnivals all over the country. Dea, the baby now grown up into a lovely young girl, has fallen in love with Gwynplaine: when she touches his face, he seems perpetually happy and smiling to her because of his scars.

A bored and spoiled duchess by the name of Josiane is told by her fiancé that seeing the show Gwynplaine and Ursus put on his the only cure to her ennui. She is perversely aroused by Gwynplaine’s grotesque appearance, so she has him summoned to court. This will lead Gwynplaine to discover his real identity and change his life…

This is a rather obscure novel in the Hugo canon, and I’ll never understand that. Maybe because it is very political. A long section is devoted to Gwynplaine acting as a mouthpiece for Hugo’s anti-monarchy manifesto, which is brilliantly written. He uses his deformed protagonist to make a vitriolic critique of social identities bases on wealth and class. But Hugo also packs much more than politics in “The Man Who Laughs”: he talks about love between family members and lovers, the real worth of wealth and the fleetingness of lust with some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read.

“La beauté de la chair, c’est de n’être point marbre; c’est de palpiter, c’est de trembler, c’est de rougir, c’est de saigner; c’est d’avoir la fermeté sans avoir la dureté; c’est d’être blanche sans être froide; c’est d’avoir ses tressaillement et ses infirmités; c’est d’être la vie, et le marbre est la mort."

"The beauty of flesh is to not be marble; it’s to shiver, it’s to tremble, it’s to blush, it’s to bleed; it’s to have firmness but to not be hard; it’s to be white without being cold; it’s to have its thrills and infirmities; it’s to be life where marble is death.”

Ouf.

If you have never read Hugo before, this is a good place to start, to get a taste of his incredible talent, without committing to the sacred monster that is “Les Misérables” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1361175662) or “Notre-Dame de Paris”. A grand, masterful work.

(The most recent movie adaptation - with Gérard Depardieu as Ursus and Montreal's own Marc-André Grondin as Gwynplaine, is visually stunning and shattering. If you get a chance to watch it, please do, you won't regret it.)

“The Man Who Laughs” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1361175607) is my favourite Victor Hugo novel, so obviously, when this graphic novel adaptation appeared on my radar (thank you, Ashley!), I simply had to get a copy! David Hine and Mark Stafford took Hugo’s story of the rise and fall of a disfigured man, and used bright colours and an exaggerated, almost surrealist style of illustration to turn it into a bold graphic novel that, just like Gwynplaine, is beautiful and grotesque at the same time.

This grim story of a corrupted, prejudiced and petty society begins with a storm, a shipwreck and two abandoned children, one blind, and one whose face has been mutilated into a chilling, permanent grin. They are taken in by a solitary, wandering philosopher and his pet wolf, and will make a simple but happy life as carnies for many years. But you know what they say about good things… When Gwynplaine’s real parentage, and therefore place in society, is brought to light, his world is upended, and while he hopes to do great things with his newfound resources, he will discover that his “smile” will always get in the way…

I must say I disagree with the author’s note at the end, that describes Hugo’s original work as boring and repetitive: I love it, and if anything, I think it's better than a lot of his other, more famous works. Of course, when adapting such a huge and convoluted book into a graphic novel, the fat must be trimmed, and if you are intimidated by the size of the original, this version is a great place to become more familiar with the story. There is still plenty of melodrama, of vitriolic social critique and terrible heartbreak, but it is definitely more portable and fast paced.

The visual style is extremely striking; I have never seen a graphic novel illustrated like this before, and it certainly carries the meaning of the story further – even if it’s not always to my taste. I think a more traditional design might have actually weakened Gwynplaine’s story by making it a bit too clean or too neat. But through this cruder style of illustration, we see how moving his tale is, we see the values Hugo wanted to convey to his readers: you can spend several minutes looking at every page, at all the little details that were included to flesh out the story.

If I have one complain, is that I wish it was longer. An exceptional adaptation of an amazing novel.

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Super geeky additional thoughts:

If you read my reviews regularly, you may have noticed that I have a… thing… for the Joker: the original inspiration for the Clown Prince of Crime was actually the 1928 movie adaptation of this story – and it’s main character’s disturbing grin. Reading Gwynplaine’s story again after consuming a ridiculous amount of Joker literature last year (and getting completely obsessed with Todd Philips’ “Joker” movie), I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between Hugo’s story and the Batman cannon: while the Joker is clearly criminally insane, he is a bit like Gwynplaine inasmuch as he has a visceral hatred of the privileged “aristocracy” (families like the Wayne family, and consequently, Batman, who as a vigilante literally takes the law into his own hands) that makes the rules. In the movie, Arthur Fleck, the man who becomes the Joker, is relentlessly crushed by a system that lets the disenfranchised fall through cracks it has no intention of fixing, in an interesting parallel to Gwynplaine’s adoptive family of carnies who live outside the rules of society, and are not considered to be a part of it – as their only value is that of fleeting entertainment. Fleck laughs compulsively because he cannot cry, the same way Gwynplaine’s disfigurement makes him smile even as the worst moments of his life unfold (the whole “Let’s put a smile on that face!” line from "The Dark Knight" is a direct reference to Hugo’s story). Obviously, Hugo’s novel has a republican (in the French sense of the word) subtext, and not an anarchic or criminal one, but I think this story was crucial to the development of the Joker’s character on more than a simple “mad smile” level.

Es innegable que el libro está excelentemente escrito, los personajes muy bien definidos y que el trabajo de documentación es de primer nivel. Pero no ha estado a la altura de lo que esperaba. Me da la sensación de que Hugo dedica más tiempo a presentar los personajes y su situación que a confrontarlos. Se habla tantísimo de las ansias de venganza de Barkilphedro y luego a la práctica apenas le vemos en acción. Se teje con esmero el complicado entramado de intrigas palaciegas en que están involucradas la reina, su hermana y su prometido, pero cuando estalla el conflicto apenas les vislumbramos de pasada. ¿Por qué tantas páginas a describirnos hasta sus más íntimas circunstancias personales, a que conozcamos hasta el más pequeño resquicio de su psicología si luego apenas se aprovecha?
Y en cambio hay aquí un exceso de verborrea. Cada vez que un personaje habla, Hugo le tiene páginas declamando sin parar con farragosas referencias cultas a mitos antiguos o sucesos históricos hasta acabar agotándome. No le pido que los diálogos sean más realistas, acepto la licencia literaria de que hasta un pordiosero de la calle te pueda citar personajes bíblicos en un diálogo en que simplemente está pidiendo un vaso de agua. Pero como lector me resulta agotador a la larga, y al llegar al final he tenido la sensación de que el potencial de la historia apenas se ha exprimido y en cambio su autor ha preferido recrearse en su prosa y en cientos de referencias cultas. No obstante me parece más que recomendable, pero no a la altura de lo esperado.