The text has been carefully adapted from the operas, the drawings are traditionally selected: the comic version of “Ring der Nibelungen” puts the superhero Siegfried in the unfavorable light of his time.
This book does something to you and at first you don’t really know why. In fact, the American comic author P. Craig Russell approached Richard Wagner’s legendary opera cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen” with such maximum deference that one can read his illustrated story, packed into clear panels, which dispenses with any modernization or contemporary interpretation, rather than transference because it has to be understood as an adaptation. And it’s also extremely well done with traditional drawing lines and colors that are somewhere between 80s comic art á la “Watchmen” and opulent Art Nouveau. The texts in the speech bubbles are on the one hand almost exciting to read, on the other hand carefully extracted from the libretto text of the four operas “Rheingold”, “Die Walküre”, “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung”. In short: if you want to delve deeper into the famous “Ring” and follow the originally intended plot without having to expose yourself to Richard Wagner’s 16 music lessons, you’ve come to the right place. So that’s what was meant!
So there you sit with the pure “Ring” theory, once adapted from the “Nibelungenlied”, the supposedly bourgeois national epic of the Germans, and read the Siegfried saga like the classic superhero story it is. The comic medium may reinforce this, but due to the described approach of the author, who has already implemented other operas such as Mozart’s “Magic Flute” as a picture story, it is ultimately just a suitable vessel. In this case, however, the fabric doesn’t look so good anymore. Because even an old fantasy story is ultimately a fantasy story that has to prove its literary value, and in this case it stands right next to other comic epics from Batman to the currently celebrated series “Saga”, among which there are also German gods adaptations like Marvel’s “Thor”.
In comparison, the “Ring des Nibelungen” reads for long stretches as an unpleasant master man’s story, whose frenzy about love, honor, loyalty, betrayal, power, fanaticism and glory seems mostly wrong, unrealistic and very non-sensual: you look into the crude A panopticon of values from another time, the passing of which one can ultimately only be happy about. And again and again a frightening idea shimmers through as to why Adolf Hitler found this story so fascinating with its consistently absent humanity: The fact that the “Ring” can only be performed today in a bending reflection via director’s theater makes perfect sense. The fact that there are now many deeply penetrating superhero comics such as “The Boys” by Garth Ennis on the question of superior power and humanity is an open question. But the fact that even the popular Spider-Man mantra “With great power grows great responsibility” ultimately brings more meaningful content to the topic leaves one pondering.
The book: Philip Craig Russell: “The Ring of the Nibelung”, Cross Cult, 448 pages, 49.99 euros.