Things get curiouser and curiouser as Reppion and Moore travel hand-in-hand with Alice this winter.

Those looking for a comic book adaptation of one of the most treasured children’s tales ever told just might tumble happily down the rabbit hole with The Complete Alice in Wonderland, an upcoming mini-series from Dynamite Entertainment. Like Alice herself says, “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations!”

Set for this November, the full-color, four-issue run—each issue totaling at 40 pages—will feature both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, as well as the lost chapter, “The Wasp in a Wig.” Writers John Reppion and Leah Moore (The Complete Dracula, Sherlock Holmes), along with artist Erica Awano, strive to preserve the Lewis Carroll 1854 original as much as possible while calling attention to the dreamlike narrative qualities. The first issue will feature a die-cut cover, which opens to reveal a John Cassaday-illustrated image of Alice and some of Wonderland’s most notable inhabitants. Reppion and Moore will also provide extras such as script pages, annotations, and samplings of Carroll’s text.

Dynamite shared with GEN the secrets of The Complete Alice in Wonderland—with the scoop emerging straight from the creative minds of More and Reppion!

As the creators themselves discovered, the famous and beloved Carroll tale does more than weave just another fairy tale—it expands and recreates the very genre. “Whilst Alice is an outsider in Wonderland, she is much more in control than the characters in other, more traditional fairy tales ever are,” explained John Reppion. “Whilst things might worry or upset her, Alice is never in any real danger. In that sense, perhaps Wonderland sanitizes the genre a bit, removing the metaphorical dangers of wolves and witches and lonely woods and replacing them with problems of etiquette and conversation. At the time of Carroll’s writing the story, the children he was writing it for were living a very comfortable life, and I suppose the lack of real danger in Wonderland represents, to some extent, the lack of real danger in their lives. In that sense, perhaps Wonderland is a middle (or upper) class fairy tale?”

Even Alice—from an upper class, herself—takes to being a polite girl whose strongest deviations are in the form of stubbornness, curiosity, and an opinionated personality. But Reppion and Moore share their own view of the charismatic Alice. “I have to say that Alice is, for the most part, quite rude, and quite pleased with herself,” admits Leah Moore. “The bit that struck me was where she is trying to work out if she has been swapped with another child, and reels off their distinguishing qualities to compare with herself. The fact that she points out that they don’t have any toys, that they don’t know anything, or that they live in ‘a poky little house’ really shocked me. I have kind of expected a Dickens-style sentimental view of the poor, and to hear Alice being so snooty was strange. In reality though, children do make their judgments based on these things, and if we are honest I think adults do, too. Possibly even judging Alice by our own modern day sensitivities is unhelpful, as her behavior might not have seemed so uncharitable at the time.”

So the question is, will the creators’ opinion of Alice influence the readers? “In our adaptation we have retained as much of the original dialogue as we possibly could,” Moore continues, “so I think a lot of her character will remain the same. We haven’t taken out the parts where she seems a bit stubborn or aloof, because it’s all part of the character of Alice. Her way of conversing with the other characters drives the plot along, and the other characters are not exactly innocent of exactly the same type of behavior as Alice. The Hatter is certainly as rude, the Caterpillar is very blunt and annoying, and there aren’t actually any characters who you feel are genuinely easy-going, carefree people. I think the most sympathetic character in Wonderland is Bill, the poor lizard who gets fired out of the chimney, wedged upside down in the jury box, and generally mistreated the whole way through. My other favorites are the guinea pigs who have to be suppressed; they seem to have the right idea!”

The characters and nature of Wonderland has popularly categorized it as “literary nonsense.” Does the whimsical tale have a moral, or does the point lie elsewhere? “The moral of the story,” interprets Reppion, “is certainly not the driving force: we are not being propelled towards a resolution which will put everything into context and give the story a meaning. I don’t think there is any real moral to Wonderland; it’s very much a story for story’s sake—’getting there’ and the route we (and Alice) take is the real reason for its telling. Carroll even plays with the concept in a conversation between the Duchess and Alice, where the former keeps trying to find the moral in everything. I tend to think of Wonderland as a cleverly constructed maze—there is a far shorter and easier route from A to B, but getting lost on the way is the true source of the fun.”

The characters in Carroll’s work are often caricatures of his various acquaintances; the author—whose real name was Charles Dodgson—even portrays himself as the dodo in “A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale.” What kind of impact will the translation from book (with artist John Tenniel’s illustrations) to comic book have on the characters’ appearances? “We haven’t specified to Erica that she should alter her artwork to include specific people’s likenesses,” Moore reasons, “so unless she draws the character very like how Tenniel draws them, the reference will only be present in the dialogue, which we have tried to give you as completely as we can. Some of the characters have a really distinct way of speaking—the Gryphon, for example—and we have always tried to keep in any characterization there. Also, if Carroll has a character acting in a certain way, we have tried to get that into the scripts—to pass on their demeanor, their way of standing or moving, so the comic doesn’t lose anything of the original. The best example of this is the really horrible part where the Duchess turns up at the croquet ground and walks along with Alice, with her pointed chin digging into Alice’s shoulder. This is such a weird thing for someone to do, and the Duchess is such a frightening character; we really wanted to make sure the reader of our adaptation felt as uncomfortable reading it as we did reading the book.”

What happens after Alice exits the rabbit hole, going back through the looking glass and leaving the colorful realm of Wonderland behind her? Does she learn anything at all? Reppion answers, “Alice’s ultimate reward is being herself in a stable, normal world. If Wonderland does have a moral it could be argued that it is ‘be thankful for what you have,’ although that seems rather too humble in face of all Alice’s snootiness. In that sense it is a far more satisfactory reward than the re-defining of a person’s character via marriage or the acquisition of riches or similar because Alice is still just Alice, and she is thankful for that. She will grow up naturally—without the aid of cakes or mushrooms of bottles labeled ‘drink me’—and become the person she is supposed to become. The natural order of things is restored.”

Leah Moore makes sense out of the sunset ending of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “I think its more Carroll letting the reader relax again. Alice’s adventures are fraught with disturbing changes in location, in size, and they have characters who are for the most part either threatening—the Cook, the Queen, the Duchess—or who change their behavior depending on who they are with. The Hatter is argumentative unless he is near the Queen. He seems really at the mercy of Society. The White Rabbit is really horrible to his servants, and then really scared of Alice when she grows and then really scared of the Queen—but then bolder with the king; he is very much more diplomatic, or more of a social climber perhaps? Certainly he’s no Machiavelli, or Iago, but he does have a public face and a private one. When Alice escapes the courtroom and wakes up under the tree, she escapes a world that seems very much fuller of adult cares and concerns rather than children’s ones. Wonderland is full of ‘High Society’ and the etiquette of that world; social strata are indicated mainly by playing card suit, a kind of weird caste system really, and the other characters seem to be distinguished from each other by how much education they have received—their relative intelligence. In the real world she knows the boundaries she operates within; she can remember her lessons and play games, and not have to worry about being trapped in complex arguments with strange people. The framing of the whole story with Alice’s big sister who tries to imagine the world Alice describes is really interesting, as that is presumably Carroll’s role in the narrative. He tries to imagine the wonderful things that would amaze and amuse this small girl, and yet at the end he knows she will grow up one day, too. The final part of the first book is a wish that the adventures Alice—and presumably her readers—have in childhood are passed on to the next generation of little girls and the next. I imagine he would be pleased to see that this is exactly what has happened, in many media and internationally, too.”

But what if Alice were to return to Wonderland? Would she find everything exactly as she left it? John Reppion muses, “After she passes through the looking glass, you mean? Well, it all depends on how old she was and what sort of life she had, really—Wonderland is a dreamscape and reflects what is going on in Alice’s mind at that time. There’s been a tendency to re-imagine Wonderland as this dark, ruined place after it has been ‘neglected’ by Alice—a nightmare version of the dream which, I suppose, is perfectly possible. If we’re talking about Alice Liddell though, although her life had its ups and downs, she seems to have been quite happy and well off for the most part. You could argue that, without the confusion and excitement of childhood, Wonderland might be rather a boring and mundane place to visit. That said, our dreams are different every night, aren’t they?”

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