# Dissected Narration in From Hell: A Graphic Translation of R. L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

Yannick Bellenger-Morvan

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Yannick Bellenger-Morvan. Dissected Narration in From Hell: A Graphic Translation of R. L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?. Image & Narrative, 2016, 17 (2), pp.34-42. hal-02537273

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# Dissected Narration in *From Hell: a Graphic Translation of R. L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?*

Yannick Bellenger-Morvan

## Abstract

This article investigates the narrative strategies implemented by artists to render visually the fantastic story born from the mind of Scottish author R. L. Stevenson, *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* (1886). After focusing on the problematic illustrations by Charles Raymond Macauley (1904) and Mervyn Peake (1948), the demonstration lays emphasis on the original graphic novel by Eddy Campbell and Alan Moore, *From Hell* (1989-1991). Carefully chosen panels are then analyzed to highlight the sophisticated combination of a highly documented script and a challenging visual rhetoric, thus addressing issues such as chronology and rhythm.

## Résumé

Cet article propose de mettre en lumière les stratégies narratives auxquelles les artistes ont recours pour traduire visuellement le récit fantastique né de l'imagination de l'écrivain écossais R. L. Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886). Après l'examen des illustrations problématiques de Charles Raymond Macauley (1904) et Mervyn Peake (1948), cette étude met l'accent sur *From Hell* (1989-1991), roman graphique original d'Eddy Campbell et Alan Moore. La question de la chronologie et du rythme est abordée grâce à des planches soigneusement sélectionnées permettant d'analyser l'association sophistiquée d'un scénario richement documenté et d'une rhétorique visuelle exigeante.

## Key words

Robert Louis Stevenson – Alan Moore – graphic novel – narrative strategies – rhythm
Although the parallels between Alan Moore and Eddy Campbell's graphic novel *From Hell* and Robert Louis Stevenson's novella *Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* appear to be many, still defining the former as an illustration of the latter may not be that obvious at first sight. In *From Hell*, William Gull,<fnref n="1" /> the Queen's doctor with a mad passion for dissecting prostitutes in the dark back alleys of Whitechapel is said to have inspired R. L. Stevenson with the dream of a split-minded scientist, whose malevolent *doppelgänger* tramples little girls and viciously assaults old men at night. William Gull's vision of Stevenson, narrated in the penultimate chapter of *From Hell* (chap. 14, 15), is contrary to any historical or chronological consistency but imprints the very graphic grid of Alan Moore and Eddy Campbell's tale with the indelible generic and genetic mark of the Victorian horror story. Indeed, *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* came out in 1886 whereas Jack the Ripper was active in 1888 only. *From Hell*, published in fourteen installments between 1989 and 1996, over a century later, then seems to be disrupting the timeline since William Gull is literally presented as an ascendant of Hyde/Jekyll, as is announced in the very title of chapter 14: "Gull, ascending". Following Alan Moore's assumption, one may then be tempted to defend the provocative idea that the Jekyll-and-Hyde motif was indeed an illustration of the mythical Janus figure of the serial killer, who managed to elude all police investigations of the case, understood both in its medical and criminal sense.

What motivates narration in *The Strange Case* is the sense of sight; the visual isotopy pervades the whole text: "eye" (6, 11, 12, 13, 18, 21, 23, 27, etc.), "see/sight/view" (7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 24, etc.), "look/ behold" (8, 9, 14, 23, etc.), "observer(s)" (19, 25, etc.) are as many landmarks setting the pace of the story, echoing from chapter to chapter. The narrator, Utterson, is also the compulsive spectator of Jekyll's tragic experiment. Quite naturally, the story has repeatedly been transposed into visual language. Vision, figuratively and metaphorically speaking, is also at the core of the structure and themes of *From Hell*. William Gull is depicted as a visionary killer, whose story is told in a most graphic manner, relying on the orthogonal grid pattern of an elaborate and sophisticated comic book.

Furthermore, the very term "illustration" has several meanings, which may entail different narrative issues. Illustration comes from the Latin *illustrare*: "casting light on" something. Historically, it may refer to the illuminations enhancing a written document, such as the drawings adorning a text. To better understand the challenge faced by Alan Moore and Eddy Campbell and to justify their need to take some distance with Stevenson's illustrious source text in *From Hell*, it is necessary to consider if there exist convincing illustrated editions of *The Strange Case*. What part do those illustrations play in the progress of the story? Can those images fully partake in a narration based on the "seen/unseen" dichotomy or do they work as mere pauses punctuating the text? I shall focus on two specific illustrated versions: the 1904 American edition illustrated by cartoonist-*cum*-caricaturist Charles Raymond Macauley<fnref n="2" /> and the 1948 British edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake.<fnref n="3" /> Macauley and Peake were both distinguished illustrators who were also novelists in their own right. C. R. Macauley published *The Red Tavern* in 1914; Mervyn Peake's *Titus Groans* and *Gormenghast* came out in 1946 and 1950 respectively. My assumption is that their writing skills might serve their work as illustrators. I also deliberately put aside editions meant for juvenile and teenage readers (mostly oversimplified retellings of the original text) as well as foreign editions (there were many of them in France, Belgium, Germany and

<footnote n="1">¹ William Gull appears as a fictitious character in *From Hell* and is identified as Jack the Ripper.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² R. L. Stevenson, *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, New York: Scott-Thaw Company, 1904. <https://archive.org/details/strangecaseofdr00stevuoft> [last consulted on 12/09/2014].</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ All those illustrations can be seen online: <https://thebookexaminer.wordpress.com/tag/mervyn-peake/> [last consulted on 12/09/2014].</footnote>
Switzerland, translated or not). I thus selected extensively illustrated editions for adult readers published in English by artists who, we may assume, knew how to tell a story.<fnref n="4" />

The second meaning of “illustration” I am interested in is that of “illumination” in the religious sense, which is transcendence. A comparison should be drawn between the textual narration of *The Strange Case* and the visual narration in *From Hell*, paying close attention to the nature of the narrators in the closing chapters of both works. To what extent does William Gull’s spiritual and imaginary ascension mirror the downfall of Dr Jekyll? Using Gérard Genette’s terminology, one may argue that Eddy Campbell’s graphic rendition of Alan Moore’s script transcends Robert Louis Stevenson’s “story” only to illustrate its visually driven narration.

The last (and more archaic) sense of “illustration” is derived from the adjective “illustrious”: illustration would then refer to the process of making a character great and/or famous. I shall devote the last part of this essay to that evolution, laying emphasis on how *From Hell* managed to turn Jekyll’s individual experiment into William Gull’s universal experience, through the use of a rhythmic, fragmented and much documented graphic narration, on the model of an autopsy, dissecting the myth of a split personality as much as the reality of a split society.

## Illustrating *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*

In R. L. Stevenson's *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, the scopic drive setting Utterson's investigation into motion is bound to be frustrated as the object of the self-imposed quest led by Jekyll's lawyer, who nicknamed himself “Mister Seek”, is none other than Mr “Hyde”, the hidden monster (14). The oxymoronic characterization of the fiend is significant. Although a monster—the Latin etymology of the term meaning “showing”, “exposing”—Edward Hyde resists any monstrating momentum: no description of Utterson's manages to encompass Edward Hyde's deformed appearance. As a homodiegetic and extradiegetic narrator, Utterson fails to draw a clear and detailed portrait of the very man he is so intent on tracking down and watching, for he is never allowed to see the monster in full when he meets him in the deep of the night (7, 13, 14, 15). It may seem an artistic *tour de force* (if not a misinterpretation of the text altogether) to try and represent Hyde, whose essential narrative quality is to evade the eyes of both characters and readers. Still, the story of the schizophrenic doctor, published in 1886, was soon to be translated into various visual languages. It was early adapted for the stage in the United States where the play was performed for the first time in 1887. It was taken to the Lyceum Theatre in London, in 1888, precisely when Jack the Ripper slaughtered five prostitutes in Whitechapel. English actor and manager Richard Mansfield, who held the title role in the American and British performances, was deemed so convincing as the mad scientist turned devilish killer that he was momentarily suspected of being the Ripper by the police and, after being cleared, was still accused of inspiring the Ripper. Although it was not inserted inside the source text, which was not initially illustrated at all, the photograph promoting the play may nonetheless be construed as a sensational illustration of the story: it shows two images of Richard Mansfield, superimposing his impersonations of Jekyll and Hyde.

<footnote n="4">⁴ Other editions are illustrated but offer too few drawings to be reliable sources.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: *Richard Mansfield as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* (1887)<fnref n="5" /></figcaption></figure>

The status of the image is quite problematic if not fully aporetic as it re-unites the two separate halves of Stevenson's character.<fnref n="5" /> Still, this photograph highlights the challenging issue of illustrating conflicting plot lines: as it gives a body to the secret personality of a man, it also won't make this initially invisible nature plainly visible. As Roger Bozetto explains "the portrait of the monster is impossible" (141-151). This obstacle can fully be felt in the illustrated editions of *The Strange Case*, mainly decorating the text with portraits of the various characters while failing to offer satisfactory narrative images.

The 1904 edition illustrated by Charles Raymond Macauley offers two types of images: nine photogravure plates facing the text and ten drawings embedded in the text. All of them are titled and listed in a table of illustrations placed at the very beginning of the book. Although they are visual landmarks in the text, the scenes chosen by the illustrator are quite surprising. Most of them, when taken out of their context, fail to represent the story precisely and can't be identified by the reader—they do not constitute an

independent network of meaning or a secondary and parallel
narration that could co-exist with the primary textual narrative.

C. R. Macauley's drawings mostly illustrate anti-climatic moments. They tend to stage situations of enunciation rather than situations of action: Utterson immersed in his thoughts; Dr Lanyon remembering his past with Dr Jekyll; Pool, the butler explaining the comings and goings of his master's assistant.

All those illustrations “live” separately—there is no graphic consistence or narrative articulation between them, which slows down the reading of the textual narrative without the benefit of any narrative “added value”. Roland Barthes (25-42) would define those illustrations as purely functional images, expressing a tautological relation between the iconic signifier and its signified expressed in the titles more than in the text itself. In that regard, there is no graphic storytelling proper. Following Roland Barthes’s semiological approach of images, I would tend to analyze those titles (short quotes or brief descriptive summaries of the plot) as “captions”: here, C. R. Macaulay’s illustrations merely convey

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2: "Mr Utterson"<fnref n="6" /></figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="5">⁵ The photograph is reproduced from the academic and public website of the University of Stirling: <http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/guestblog/feast-your-eyes-again-glut-your-soul-on-my-accursed-ugliness%E2%80%9D-gothic-horror-%E2%80%93-thinking-in-images/attachment/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-stage-1887-richard-mansfield/> [last consulted on 12/09/2014].</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 R. L. Stevenson, *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, illustrated by C. R. Macauley, New York: Scott-Thaw Company, 1904, p. 14. This illustrated version has now fallen in the public domain and can be downloaded for free: <https://archive.org/details/strangecaseofdr00stevuoft> [last consulted on 12/09/2014].</footnote>
textual information; there is no extra graphic encoding. In that regard, those images are so literal that their
titles are captions that help the reader understand them. The iconic signs are so vague in isolation, they are like
deictics, depending on their titles to be specified and understood. C. R. Macauley's illustrations of static and
disconnected scenes fail to suggest narration efficiently.

In the 1948 British edition, Mervyn Peake chose to illustrate well-chosen excerpts, literally highlighting some scenes as they are put forward as chapter heads. They are full-page black and white untitled drawings, with a touch of yellow. Unlike C. R. Macauley, Mervyn Peake chose action scenes and tried to render movement visually. As they are not limited by a title or an inappropriate quote, his illustrations are quite dynamic and manage to suggest narration. Thierry Groensteen explains that narrative movement can be induced in a fixed image on the condition the image is evocative of a "transformation" (29). Citing Gérard Genette, he makes a distinction between telling (*diegesis*) and showing (*mimesis*). To "tell a story", an isolated image needs to imply something happened before and something is bound to occur afterward, inducing an implicit causal link between what can be seen in the picture and what cannot. Several images would then be mentally juxtaposed.

The first illustration to be singled out appears on page 36.<fnref n="7" /> It may seem elliptic at first sight—a man walking in a dark street. Still, the role of what Thierry Groensteen calls the “monstrator” (or “graphic narrator”) is here emphasized. Although no title is there to guide us, it is easy to understand that, as only the man’s back is to be seen, the figure is that of Hyde, being followed by Utterson. Obviously, the monstrator is Utterson, whose internal focalisation is embraced by the reader in both the image and text. In the next example, which is to be found page 103, a small hand in close-up, barely visible in a sleeve, suggests the shrinking process that occurs when Jekyll metamorphoses into Hyde. The close-up enabled Mervyn Peake to preserve the secret and deformed features of the monster. Eventually, in the very last illustration (Peake 110), the monster is plainly revealed, while traces of Jekyll, such as the test tube, are still visible to expose his true identity. Mervyn Peake managed to find his own visual language to tell the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and did not merely “imitate” the source text.

Following Thierry Groensteen's theory, disconnected illustrations do not seem to be able to construct graphic narration effectively. The interplay of text and image is at stake in C. R. Macaulay's and Mervyn Peake's works, all the more so when they try to offer the visual translation of a story, the narrative crux of which is the transformation of a two-faced monster. In terms of narration, there were many pitfalls that were hard to avoid. The graphic novel could be the most effective medium to create a convincing narrative illustration of Stevenson's story.

## Doctor Jekyll, descending vs “Doctor Gull, ascending”

As a sequential artwork, *From Hell* seems at first sight to follow the same narrative thread as *The Strange Case*: it questions the roots of the evil crimes committed by an illustrious doctor whose portrait could well fit that of Jekyll in his “Full Statement of the Case”: a man, then,

> [...] fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow-men, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. [...] Hence it came about

<footnote n="7">⁷All the illustrations by Mervyn Peake mentioned in this article can be seen here: <https://thebookexaminer.wordpress.com/tag/mervyn-peake/> [last consulted on July 6th, 2015]. Page numbers are the same as in the paper edition.</footnote>
that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look around
me, and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound
duplicity of life. (55)

As Jekyll is ultimately allowed to give his own account of his story, *From Hell* also offers an insight into William Gull's mind in the chapter entitled “Gull's Ascending.” The two chapters narrate the experience of those duplicitous selves, adopting an intimate first-person narrative perspective. They share the same chronological and structural position in the diegesis, closing the story with the deaths of their protagonists and narrators. Still, while Jekyll's narration is a re-telling of his story, ridden with shame and guilt, tending towards self-destruction and death, Gull's narration is a remorseless vision and perhaps, even, revision of human history, evil transcending the limits of an individual, to extend its influence over mankind as a whole. In Stevenson's text, narration is driven by a regressive impulse: Jekyll, though appearing for the first and only time as a first-person narrator, as an “I” mastering his tale, is gradually losing control over his darker primitive ape-like side. His bodily and moral transformations are described in terms of “dissolution” (59), as a “movement [...] wholly towards the worse” (59). Conversely, the narrative movement in “Gull, ascending” is, quite logically, ascending—the onomastic reference to the bird conjuring up the symbolic image of a spiritual ascension. In the opening double page (chap. 14, 4-5), Doctor Gull is seen shut away in his cell, which is used as a sexual shelter for wardens and nurses. Images of that secret lewd meeting encapsulate the whole chapter: Gull's spiritual journey from darkness to dazzling light is thus literally put into the brackets of drab reality. The eye motif is borrowed from Stevenson but is turned into an inward eye or “I”, since the doctor is now an autodiegetic narrator: he is the narrator of a story of which he is both the main actor and the author. The reader is then faced with an utterly subjective narration, the eye motif being repeated as a rhyme, creating a mesh of meaning in a narration that is otherwise madly intricate and verging on the abstract.

*From Hell's* interpretation of Dr Jekyll's “Full Statement of the case” does not deviate significantly from the original, for, as “undignified” (59) as it might be, Jekyll's transformation is also described in terms of “pleasure” (56), something “incredibly sweet” (57), and “exquisitely thin and icy” (61). *From Hell* tends to express explicitly what is implicit in Stevenson—in that regard, “Gull, Ascending” might be construed as the illustration of the repressed subtext of *The Strange Case*, literally casting light on (illustrating in its etymological sense) the underlying meaning of Jekyll's confession. “When we are shown Robert Louis Stevenson awakening from a nightmare of ‘a doctor with the soul of a terrible beast inside him’, the inspiration for *Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*,” the actual criminal case and the literary myth are intertwined, thus continuing the ‘Ripper legacy’” (Round 192). Julia Round explains how “*From Hell* [...] seems to recall the type of co-present chronology Moore assigns to the notion of a book-as-a-whole, because events are multiplied and revisited without recourse to a single, linear chronology” (191). Indeed, as a spatio-topic narrative system, the graphic novel allows a comprehensive and fragmented reading of the story (Groensteen 11). The grid and the panels manage to visualize what is at stake in Jekyll's confession in the very “texture” of the narration. Jekyll and Hyde are not only two, they are also one and the same man. The ambiguity is conveyed in Stevenson's text through the hesitation between the grammatical operators “both” and “either” (56). In *From Hell*, as the fragmented page can also be read comprehensively, the dual personality of the doctor can fully exist as “both” and “either” concomitantly. The repetition of some iconic motifs, such as the “eye”, forces the reader to infer a meaningful relationship between images that are otherwise discontinuous.
“Gull, Ascending” oscillates between narrative over-determination and narrative indetermination. Many panels and even complete strips are meaningless, whether using indeterminate fully black or fully white panels, or excessively determinate close-ups. “Gull, Ascending” is a good example of the extent to which Eddy Campbell’s graphic organisation rejects narrative conventions: as in the whole novel, the reading of that chapter is not linear or syntagmatic but circular and paradigmatic, working through association of iconic signs, shifting from the figurative to the metaphorical or allegorical. The eye is a good example of that phenomenon: the black pupil merging into the darkness of a tunnel, the flicker of white light in its iris duplicated in the speech balloon and the bright opening figuring the end of the tunnel of Gull’s childhood memory (chap. 14, 4-5). Narration follows a concentric pattern, based on graphic syllepsis, a trope which Thierry Groensteen considers as a way of figuring narrative temporality and memories, thanks to repetitions. In that sense, *From Hell* qualifies as a contemporary comic book, relying on poetic visual ambiguity—thus mirroring the doctor’s ambiguous nature—and blurring strategies. The “eye” motif also echoes what Ann Miller names “ocularisation” (16), referring to the images embracing the ocular viewpoint of a character but also the images presenting mere traces of subjectivity, notably through deformation, in other words, any subjective image. In that regard, *From Hell* uses an eminently “ocularised” narration as opposed to the visually driven (and frustrated) narration in *The Strange Case*.

***From Hell: one illustration of the mythical split-minded doctor***

*From Hell*'s narration is indeed an illustration of the contradiction in the doctor's mind, may his name be Jekyll or Gull. The nine-panel orthogonal grid, with its conventional, repetitive and well-ordered pattern, is alternately broken and supported by the overall rhizomic and paradigmatic structure of the work: aesthetic and semantic intents are thus intermingled. The same pattern may produce opposite effects. In the following example, taken from chapter 5 (34-35), the double page is composed of what seems to be the juxtaposition of the same panel over and over again: the same street, the same building and the body of the doctor's latest victim can be seen in the background. Only the figures of the policemen introduce some change in the otherwise fixed composition. The series of images seem over determinate as they co-exist simultaneously on the double page. The scene obviously reminds the reader of “The Story of the Door”, in Stevenson's *Strange Case*, the very chapter in which Hyde's misdeeds are told for the first time: in a street of Soho, he tramples a little girl and righteous witnesses immediately force him to pay the poor girl's family to make reparations (7-8); the pace of the narration is fast, suggesting violence and revulsion. In Eddy Campbell's graphic version of the Soho crime scene, there is no Victorian pathos. The repetition of nearly identical panels slows the narration down to the point of stasis. Time is dilated. Nobody hurries to help the woman, whose body is part of the background, as insignificant as the rest of the setting. As the same panel showing the same setting is used as the backdrop of the killing, the killer and the policemen are literally represented on the same plane. The narration, that is the sequence of events, is a dispassionate report, as in an autopsy, the threefold definition of which serves as an epigraph to the prologue: "1. Dissection and examination of a dead body to determine the cause of death. 2. An eye witness observation. 3. any critical analysis [from Greek *autos*, self + *opsis*, sight: the act of seeing with one own's eyes]."

The next example taken from *From Hell* (chap. 10, 12-13) is built on the same orthogonal format.
Still, the double page does not seem to convey any narration proper. Hardly decipherable iconic signs are juxtaposed. Although verging on the abstract, a network of graphic connections is to be observed, leading the reader's gaze from vignette to vignette, out of the anatomic chaos of arteries, organs and blood: the geometric form of the circle is thus repeated (the loose end of the artery, the reflection of light in the drops of blood and then in the eye of the killer). Once again the definition of the autopsy is relevant as the attention of the reader is driven from the examination of the inside of the body (first meaning in the definition) to the eye of the direct witness of the scene (the doctor, third definition). For Thierry Groensteen, such an abstract construction requires the active participation of the reader to build the meaning of the story and fails to produce narration—he would thus define such a scene as infra-narrative. Although the panels are organised in a sequence, their articulations are not function links but metaphorical, plastic or poetic links. Graphic rhetoric is here based on the use of anaphoras and anadiplosis, creating rhythm and some semiotic rambling which seems close to the stream of consciousness.

Eddy Campbell seems to reject traditional readability for the benefit of exploration. Although black and white drawings are common, as they are cheaper to make, still, researcher Jan Baetens points out that the use of black and white is first and foremost a refusal—of faithful *mimesis*, of the imitation of the real, already aiming at abstraction (182-186). As in many other contemporary comic books or graphic novels, Eddy Campbell's style is heterogeneous, multi-modal as Thierry Groensteen would put it, contrary to the dogma of the homogeneous style. Eddy Campbell's interpretation of the two-faced scientist is also expressed *via* a polygraphic and polyphonic narration. Changing styles, changing modes of representation is highly significant, as it may express the viewpoints of various characters or the changing emotions of the same character. This expressionistic form of what I would call graphic dialogism is compared by Thierry Groensteen to James Joyce's *Ulysses* and defines modern graphic narration. In chapter 5, gently water-couloured domestic scenes alternate with the harsh hatchings of London's street life scenes: the sweet harmony of Gull's *bourgeois* interior serves as a counterpoint to the drab desperation of poor women in Soho. Annalisa Di Liddo underlines the striking antithesis in Eddy Campbell's description of East End and West End London (82). In Chapter 5, "despite their poverty, the slums of London teem with life and character, in their vivacity and diversity, the slums—and not the affluent monumentality of the West End—ultimately lie at the core of the peculiar fascination with late Victorian London that captivate [...] Moore" (Di Liddo 83). Two parallel stories are thus told in this sequence that runs from page 4 to page 9. If each panel is unbiased, the juxtaposition of the two opposite styles sets the tone of the double page. The critique of divided London, of its split social hierarchy, is blatant. Eddy Campbell's critical autopsy of Victorian mores is all the sharper as his graphic narration is interspersed with precisely documented references and iconic quotes. In that regard, *From Hell* might be considered as an illustrated anthology of Victorian myths—Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, of course, Jack the Ripper, especially through the visual quotation of Victorian newspapers, and even the Elephant Man. It is also a collection of the works of famous illustrators, such as William Blake in the reproduction of "the ghost of a flea" (chap. 14, 17), a representation of pure evil Gull prides himself on having inspired. Thus "evil incarnate" is exploited as a transfictional and transmedial narrative motif.

*From Hell* is obviously not a literal illustration of *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, yet the graphic novel offers a diegetic variation, relying on the fragmentation of its narration and the staging of margins. It reveals a transfictional isotopy, connecting common "semes" or meaning traits *via* several supports.
*The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* is about the moral duplicity of its character expressed through the hybrid nature of the monster and of the text, whose primary narration is interrupted by other sub-narrations (letters, confessions, etc.). The basic storyline could only thrive and expand in a hybrid medium such as the graphic novel, equally combining text and image. Hybrid narrative illustration then seems to have no end and Jekyll and Hyde are still the object of many visual and technical experiments, especially through the development of “hybrid books”: several designers have worked on new alternative illustrations for *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*. Spanish graphic designer Alberto Fernández's approach<fnref n="8" /> is multidimensional while German designers Martin Kovacovsky and Marius Hügli's project<fnref n="9" /> is using an augmented reality technology, thus inducing more active modes of reading the story.

## Works Cited

Baetens, Jan. *The Graphic Novel*. Leuwen: Leuwen University Press, 2001. Print.

Barthes, Roland. *L'Obvie et l'Obtus*. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982. Print.

Bozetto, Roger. "L'impossible portrait du monstre." R. L. Stevenson et A. Conan Doyle, *aventure de la fiction*. Ed. Jean-Pierre Naugrette et Gilles Ménégaldo. Rennes: Terres de Brume, 2003. Print.

Di Liddo, Annalisa. *Alan Moore, Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel*. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009. Print.

Groensteen, Thierry. *Bande dessinée et narration, Système de la bande dessinée*. Paris: PUF, 2011. American edition: *Comics and Narration*. Trans. by Ann Miller. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2013. Print.

Miller, Ann. *Reading Bande Dessinée*. Bristol, Chicago: Intellect, 2007. Print.

Moore, Alan and Eddie Campbell. *From Hell, Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts*. 1989. Marietta, Georgia: Top Shelf Productions, 2006. Print.

Round, Julia. "'Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting wippers.' A Barthesian Analysis of the Construction of Fact and Fiction in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's *From Hell*." *The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form*. Ed. Joyce Coggin and Dan Hassler-Forest. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: MacFarland Publishers, 2010. Print.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*. 1886. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Print.

---. *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, illustrated by C. R. Macauley. New York: Scott-Thaw Company, 1904. Web. Last consulted on 12/09/2014. <https://archive.org/details/strangecaseofdr00stevuoft>

---. *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, illustrated by Mervyn Peake. London: The Folio Society, 1948. Print.

Holder of a PhD in English Literature, **Yannick Bellenger-Morvan** is a senior lecturer at the University of Rheims. Her research focuses on children's literature and juvenile culture. She has published articles on fantasy fiction for children and young adults in novels, films and TV series. She is currently working on narrative issues in picture books.

Email: yannick.bellenger@univ-reims.fr

<footnote n="8">8. <http://blogs.erg.be/a Propos/?tag=dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde> [last consulted on 09/14/2014].</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. <http://martinkovacovsky.ch/jekyll-hyde/> [last consulted on 09/14/2014].</footnote>