Adapted by Rio Youers
Based on the book by
Stephen King and Owen King
Art by Alison Sampson
Published by IDW Publishing
In Stephen and Owen King’s opus Sleeping Beauties, a world-wide pandemic of “sleeping sickness” dubbed Aurora (after Sleeping Beauty) is causing women (and those who identify as female) to fall into a deep sleep, unable to wake up, and cocooned in a web-like shroud that, when ripped open, causes a violent, psychotic break in the unconscious women. As countries begin to fall apart in the path of the epidemic, women fight to stay awake by any means necessary, while the men of the world give into the darkest, most violent aspects of themselves.
In the tiny town of Dooling, West Virginia a woman named Eve steps out of the woods and brings the chaos of violence and the sleeping sickness with her.
Is she the harbinger of the End of Days? A gate keeper of some sort?
All that is clear is that Eve is the only woman who can wake up, and that makes her both the most important and feared person on Earth.
So let’s talk about this adaptation.
It is well-known that any King story (and in this case, a collaboration with his son Owen) based on an expansive idea like a pandemic or an alternate world is going to be FULL.
Full of characters, full of world building and full of in-depth minutia that creates the kind of very deep and reality-based story that King’s career is built on. Adapting a 700 page book of this nature into a multi-volume 24-32 page comic book series is incredibly difficult. Honing down the essentials, creating the panels that help pace and push forward the story without it becoming anemic, while still honoring the vision of the author(s) can seem like a monumental challenge. But it has been done and done well, in both The Dark Tower and The Stand series.
However, in Sleeping Beauties it isn’t and that is a shame.
First of all the panel pacing feels schizophrenic and the jumps are more than confusing. Even as someone who has read the original source material and knows the story, I had to go back and re-read pages to see if I had missed something. For someone coming into the graphic novel blind it can be a little “What’s Happening Here?” and that isn’t great. Cuts between silent panel pages and dialogue panel pages can work if done right, but here these feel like oversized road bumps that interrupt the story more than push it forward, and you end up feeling like you’re in a manual transmission car being driven by an automatic driver. The stops and starts are hurting it.
There’s also the skeletonization of the story itself that is a major problem.
Sleeping Beauties is an epic tale that deep dives into sexism, misogyny, human value, the concept of morality as well as alternate worlds and mythic fantasy; and while successful comics can combine art and/or dialogue to flesh out a lot of the story, choosing scenes and situations that compose the “prime cut” of the plot need to be done with a deft hand. Here, a lot of the choices feel very, very thin. Sure, the story hits the basic plot points, but it does so without creating any depth to it, making the reader feel a little short-changed.
Before I continue, let me pause and say this: the artwork by Alison Sampson is great and the coloring by Triona Tree Farrell creates a deep, moody tone which gives this adaptation a fighting chance. I enjoyed the artwork immensely, I just wish it could have been for a story that deserved it. And I don’t want to disparage Rio Youers either, as he is a good writer and understands the genre he is adapting, but I believe the main issue with Sleeping Beauties is that Youers wasn’t allotted enough issues to give the adaptation the treatment it deserved, and it suffers from that.
The entire series run is 10 issues for a book that is 700 pages long. That is a lot of cutting and sacrifice, especially at the expense of the characterization. You don’t get a chance to care that much about any of them because there’s not much of an opportunity to know them with such a short volume run. And when there are a good deal of characters that are supposed to move the plot along, the lack of time make them into acquaintances, rather than interesting, fleshed out companions for the story.
Another concern is that this compendium only includes the first five issues (the sixth issue comes out in June 2021), leaving a reader to wonder why, with only ten issues, IDW didn’t just wait to collect them all at the end of the run. It could have made for a better reading experience and, perhaps, given the adaptation a less anorexic feeling, something that could have improved the overall experience for the audience.
When you have a miniscule comic run that doesn’t give the source material its due and couple it with a first-of-two graphic novel that splits that run in half, the result is a serious reading-pleasure problem (by comparison the graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods had almost three times the issues – 27 issues to be exact – and the original novel clocks in at 465 pages, a good 235 pages fewer than Sleeping Beauties, allowing for better character growth and story). I feel this could have been solved had there been an opportunity to expand the story with additional issues, or, at the very least, if IDW had waited until the story was completed in full before it was collected into a graphic novel, potentially giving it a better chance to feel like a decent adaptation.
My overall opinion concerning Sleeping Beauties is fairly simple: if you are interested in reading the series, wait for it to finish before diving in (It’s too short to do anything else) and then buy the two-volume set.
If you have read the original novel and want to see for yourself how the adaptation holds up, I’d suggest letting some time lapse after reading Stephen and Owen King’s tome, otherwise you will be disappointed with the bareness of the graphic novel’s story and lack of character development (at least in the first five issues so far), and your interest in the first volume of the adaptation will not be enough to make you want to wait six months for volume two.
