There have been many re-interpretations of Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly its first part, Inferno, since the poet wrote his vision of heaven and hell in the early fourteenth century. As well as influencing writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam and Jorge Luis Borges, it has inspired classical (Puccini, Liszt) and popular (Nine Circles, Depeche Mode) music, video games - most notably Dante's Inferno (2010) - and has been illustrated repeatedly by an infernal army of artists, most notably Gustave Doré, Salvador Dali and, of course, William Blake.
The connection between Blake and Dante is explored in a particularly fascinating way in a new comic written by Lonnie Nadler and Zac Thompson and illustrated by Kyle Charles, Dee Cunniffe and Ryan Ferrier. Entitled Her Infernal Descent, the series - the first episode of which, "Denial", was released this week - charts the journey of a lonely widow into hell to find her family. We find the, as-yet-unnamed, protagonist in her home, void of the life once given to the place by her husband and children but full of the detritus of material that reminds her of them. She herself is ageing, visibly sinking into despondency and unable to rouse herself from the deadening effects of loss, and the opening pages have been noted by several reviewers for the simplicity and beauty of their engagement with an all-too ordinary form of grief.
It is five pages in, after a beautifully illustrated montage of her climbing into an attic to pack away yet more mundane stuff of finished lives, that she encounters the figure who will be the spirit guide on her future journey: William Blake. In a reverse scene of that in Alan Moore's From Hell, when William Gull (Moore's Jack the Ripper) appears as a ghost to Blake and inspires the original The Ghost of a Flea, Blake rears up before her in the attic space to tell her that he has spoken to her family in hell and that she now has the opportunity to accompany him there. Sceptical at first, she soon succumbs to his prophetic charms (as so many of us do) and lets him lead her out into the dreamlike streets that soon transform into a portal into the underworld.
All the reviews I've read have been extremely positive, and in general I can see why. The artwork is delicate and reminiscent of the work of Dave McKean and Eddie Campbell in particular. While I am less impressed by the writing than some, for reasons I'll outline below, nonetheless the topic is wonderful in its scope, especially as it combines the descent into hell with such a mundane sense of an ordinary woman's life. It's not quite the first graphic novel version: Joseph Lanzara's Dante's Inferno (2012) made use of Doré's art in a frankly derivative fashion while Gary Panter's Jimbo in Purgatory (2004) is a much more original take. Her Infernal Descent is very much in the latter category, and for this reason alone is a worthy example of the inclusion of Blake - as well as Dante - in a long line of comic-book adaptations.
While this version is extremely admirable for so many reasons, however, its depiction of Blake is one with which I can't quite connect. The initial appearance of Blake bears a resemblance to that of Eddie Campbell's in From Hell, yet is more gaunt, rather like a spectral Nick Cave. That connection would be admirable enough, but throughout the comic it was a slight irritation to me that this was not my Blake as I so often imagine him based on a series of paintings and drawings of the artist during his lifetime. This, however, was much less of an issue than his tendency to speak in rhyming couplets: William Blake was not necessarily averse to such couplets - they appear, most notably, throughout Auguries of Innocence - but the form is actually a relatively rare one for Blake. After meeting him and before deciding to go along for the ride, the protagonist asks him, "Are you gonna be rhyming the whole time?" and, I'm afraid, I felt her pain, as in such lines as the following:
You should be assured hell is as real as the great human spirit. This offer only comes once, or be cast aside if thou fear it.
This example (admittedly one of the worst in the issue) appears to be attempting to emulate both Blake's fourteeners from epic poems such as Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion as well as the heroic couplets of the Augustan age. Frankly, it doesn't work, not least because the rhythm (something that Blake was a thorough master of at his very best) is all utterly irregular and thus fails to scan effectively.
Somewhat less egregious, but also mildly annoying to me, are some weird decisions - probably factual errors - on the part of the writers of Her Infernal Descent: Blake talks about the loss of his son throughout the issue, and I couldn't escape the feeling that this was not a profound if obscure reference to Tristanne Connolly's work on Catherine Blake's miscarriage in William Blake and the Body (a hypothesis that was never widely known) as a simple mistake for the death of Blake's brother, Robert. Likewise, when the pair first descend into hell, Blake greets the classical writers Plato, Aristotle, Ovid and Homer as those figures "from whom the word of power I glean". While this line strictly refers to a pseudo-occult power that Blake as psychopomp possesses in the comic, the notion that Blake the man would have given such reverence to classical authors - whom he so memorably attacks in the Preface to Milton a Poem - is inaccurate.
And yet, despite these criticisms, Her Infernal Descent is a wonderful book. I am most certainly not the target audience for a graphic novel of this kind and, the occasional very poor poetic couplet aside, most of my criticisms above are nitpicking or subjective responses. Above all else, the fact that the authors decided that William Blake should replace Virgil as the archetypal guide to the underworld is a brilliant conceit, demonstrating a deft understanding of pop culture appropriations of Blake that generally work. I doubt that many readers with at least a passing understanding of the Romantic's poetry would question his suitability as a spiritual guide, and although this first issue essentially sets the scene for further encounters I wonder how much of Blake's antinomian visions of hell will percolate through future episodes of the comic.
Her Infernal Descent is published by AfterShock, aftershockcomics.com, RRP $3.99 or £2.49.