Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped – the graphic novel


Adapted by Alan Grant & Cam Kennedy (Waverley Books)
ISBN: 978-1-902407-38-8

Practically as soon as comicbooks were invented, high-minded enterprising souls were using the new medium to get readers interested in great literature: paring down deathless prose whilst adding the sheer power of pictures in narrative sequence.

In most cases over the intervening decades these adaptations have been less than stellar, but every so often a piece of work emerges that is not just a mere distillation, adjunct or accommodation but actually works as well in comics terms as the original literary ones.

One sterling example of such graphic magic came out of the 2004 selection of Edinburgh as the first UNESCO City of Literature, when Scottish funnybook veterans Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy were invited to convert a brace of classic tales by Robert Louis Stevenson to publishing’s hottest medium…

With a bare minimum of abridgement or adulteration and astonishingly augmented by the stunning art and colours of the inimitable Kennedy, the timelessly classic tale unfolds beginning with seventeen year old David Balfour who in June 1751 strides away from rural Essendean and the only home he has even known into peril, terror and astounding adventure…

Upon his father’s death Davie receives a letter which reveals the existence of a relative he never knew he possessed, so he promptly walks all the way to Edinburgh and sees for the first time the dilapidated, broken-down but still imposing House of Shaws.

At a time when the oppressive English conquerors are still openly revelling in crushing the Jacobite Rebellion, his progress is slow and cautious. One day David reaches the manor but is not comforted nor relieved, having heard no good word from any he passed about Ebenezer Balfour and his “house built on blood”…

The Laird is an elderly, scared-seeming, guilt-wracked scoundrel who grudgingly takes David in after declaring himself his uncle. Soon, however, David comes to realise that not only has Ebenezer long ago swindled his deceased brother out of his inheritance but is prepared to kill his only kin to keep it…

Forewarned, outraged and wary, Davie nonetheless falls into a trap when he accompanies his uncle to the family lawyer Rankeillor – purportedly to make amends and square accounts – at Queen’s Ferry. The lad is tricked aboard the brig Covenant where he learns Ebenezer has paid villainous Captain Hoseason to transport him to the New World to be sold as a slave…

Clubbed unconscious and inescapably trapped, David plunges into despair and illness. His unwanted journey is marked with brutality and horror, but marginally improves after he witnesses the murder of the cabin boy Ransome and is compelled to become that poor soul’s replacement.

A week later everything changes after the Covenant collides with a smaller vessel in the fog and a survivor is hauled aboard. The small, ferocious and exceedingly dangerous-looking straggler is Alan Breck Stewart: an earnest Jacobite who spends his days collecting debts for the defeated Highland chiefs-in-exile and smuggling the money to them in France.

More avaricious than political, the captain agrees to ferry Breck to a friendly destination for sixty golden guineas but when David overhears Hoseasons and First Mate Mr. Shuan planning to murder the Highlander, he makes a fateful life-changing decision…

Allying himself with Breck, young Balfour gets his first taste of battle and bloodletting when the pair heroically confront the crew from a readymade fortress in the main cabin. With nine men dead or maimed, Hoseasons has no choice but to negotiate and sullenly agrees to put them both ashore at Linnhe Loch, but even before the Covenant can reach that outpost of relative safety, the ship founders on a reef with David and Breck lost over the side…

Cast away and lost he is eventually reunited with Breck, only to endure hardship, horror, pursuit and personal degradation as he and his contentious, complicated comrade are hunted by Royalist forces for the murder of Colin Roy Campbell, known and dreaded as King George’s agent “the Red Fox” who punishes and persecutes Highlanders and honest men, even selling them into slavery…

Their trials and tribulations as outlaws of the heather, their meetings with kindred spirits, strains on their newfound friendship and eventual bringing to justice of the conniving Ebenezer Balfour are all deliciously revealed in gripping form and glorious imagery (although purists might miss much of Breck’s more esoteric phraseology) as the novel comes to rousing life in an iteration certain to please both devotees and first time readers.

Moody, evocative, fast-paced and gripping, this graphic goldmine was also released in two local languages: translated and dialogued in Lowland Scots as Kidnappit by Matthew Fitt & James Robertson and as Fo Bhruid – a Gaelic iteration translated by Iain MacDhòmhnaill.
Adapted text © 2006 Alan Grant. Illustrations © 2006 Cam Kennedy. All rights reserved.