The King in Yellow
by INJ Culbard
adapted from the short stories by Robert Chambers
1895, adapted 2015
The King in Yellow is a graphic novel adaptation of the first four stories in Robert Chambers' 1895 collection of the same name, by British comics artist INJ Culbard.
Chambers' stories remain pretty well known among fans of weird fiction, inspiring, among other things, some of the imagery in the first season of True Detective, as well as the indie D&D adventure Carcosa. I know Culbard from his comic Brass Sun, but I gather he has a number of these illustrated adaptations.
The four stories each contain characters who read the fictional play The King in Yellow. Supposedly its performance and even script are banned, but it circulates by being passed from reader to reader. The first act is fantastical horror story, and Chambers introduces each story with an epigraph supposedly from Act I. The second act isn't directly described, except that people who start reading it aren't able to stop partway through. They're driven mad, and are compelled to share the script with others. People who've read the play seem to believe that The King in Yellow is a real person (or god), that they serve him, and that his symbol, The Yellow Sign, can be used to identify both fellow believers and the King's commands.
In "The Repairer of Reputations," Hildred is a troubled young man who was recently released from an asylum where he was kept due to severe personality changes after falling off a horse and hitting his head. He's convinced that he can be crowned as some sort of royalty, but that first he needs to kill his own cousin (whom he believes is a rival heir). I love Culbard's rendering of Hildred as someone with an overly intense stare, who very clearly unnerves the people around him. Hildred has read the play, and after the violent conclusion of his plan, it's mailed to a friend in Paris.
In "The Mask," the sculptor who reads the play develops a chemical that converts living matter into something like white marble. He likens this process to the sculptural equivalent of photography. After preserving a rose and a rabbit, he gets the idea to try his chemical on a person...
In "The Yellow Sign," the play next arrives by mail for another artist. He and his life-model girlfriend are both troubled by nightmares, and then both read the play, which makes everything worse.
Finally, in "The Court of the Dragon," the young man from the previous story, already mostly out of his mind, is tormented by visions and phantom music.
This is a nicely spooky adaptation. "The Repairer of Reputations" remains my favorite. It has elements of science fiction and alternate history, though it's sort of ambiguous if these are 'real' or symptom's of Hildred's madness. As a stand-alone, it's equally ambiguous if the play is special or just something he's fixated on. Its recurrence in the other stories is what makes the play's power over its readers definitively 'real,' as we see life after life ruined by reading it. Honestly, given Hildred's instability, it would be hard to take his beliefs seriously if not for the later stories, which retroactively lend him a bit of credibility.
Culbard makes a couple key changes, though I think they're faithful to the spirit of the originals. Most importantly, he treats these as four chapters of a single novella, rather than stand-alone stories. The young man from "The Yellow Sign" appears in both the earlier stories as a friend of the other characters who is alarmed by their fate. It is literally the same copy of the cursed play that is read and passed on each time. The final story (originally the third), is rendered nearly wordlessly, as this character has been driven mad, the pages filled with stylized musical notes and visions of the King.
The idea of the play The King in Yellow is still compelling today, I think. It's a kind of thought experiment, a book that probably should be banned. The idea of a text that, if you read it, changes you in a way that you can't prevent or reverse, remains frightening. It's probably the basis for David Langford's 'basilisk' stories and the contemporary 'cognitohazard' concept - it's a danger that you can only escape by avoiding all contact with it. There's no safe way to study the text without succumbing to it; worse still, you can encounter it entirely by accident simply by doing the thing we all do all day long - read text without knowing what it says already. I think it's that idea that keeps us coming back to Chambers over a century later.
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