Sandra Marrs and John Chalmers are graphic novelists, responsible for the 'Louis' series of books and many other projects. Their work can be seen at www.metaphrog.com. For National Poetry Day they have been undertaking a special project which will reach more than 30,000 children and adults.

 

When we were asked by The Association for Scottish Literary Studies to make a comic adaptation of Edwin Morgan's poem The First Men on Mercury we felt honoured. Edwin Morgan has always been a great innovator, unafraid of experimentation and we have enormous respect for his work.

 

The poem, being largely dialogue based, perhaps lends itself more readily to a comic adaptation. We were acutely aware that by adding any images we were simultaneously going to be taking something away from a reader's own visual interpretation of the poem read as pure text, and so tried to be as sensitive as we could to this fact.

 

Working together on our Louis graphic novels we always find ourselves trying to solve visual story-telling problems that are peculiar to each story. Normally our process would involve working back and forth together from script to dummy and then to final layout. Here, we had to carefully discuss the possible interpretations and ideas that explode from a poem.

 

It proved to be great fun and we were delighted to receive the poet's blessing. All the secondary school pupils in Glasgow will receive a printed copy of the poem adapted to comic form on National Poetry Day and on that date it will be more widely available online at http://www.metaphrog.com/mercury

 

This seems a great way to interest children and adults in poetry visually.