‘Christabel’ was illustrated by @annafitz in 2012 for ‘Doomed Romantics’, a graphic novel anthology of Dark Romanticism that unfortunately never found a publisher. Envisioned as a collection of comic-book adaptations of Romantic poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, there were some fantastic artists and writers attached at pitch stage, so it was heartbreaking that we couldn’t find a home for it. I’m still working with Anna today so it wasn’t entirely a lost cause, but it felt criminal that more eyes didn’t see ‘Christabel’.
This collects all the material Anna and I created for ‘Christabel’. Anybody familiar with the poem will know that it was one of Coleridge’s unfinished fragments, and I’d planned what I thought would be a natural ending, but it seems unlikely the comic will ever be finished now. The front and back covers were created by longtime collaborator ‘Death Sentence: London’ artist Martin Simmonds. Hopefully next I’ll be able to share the other pitch pages from ‘Doomed Romantics’, which were from an adaptation of ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ by me and @alwyntalbot. I’ll share these as soon as I’ve checked that he’s happy for me to post them.