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A Tale of Three Candides: Sfar, Meyran and Delcourt Recount Voltaire

French graphic artists have retold Voltaire’s 18th Century philosophical tale Candide three times: (Joann Sfar; 2003. Philippe Meyran; 2004. Editions Delcourt; 2008-). Despite the rise of adaptation studies, that curious fact has aroused no critical attention. My article is the only comparative analysis of those three Candides. The theoretical approach is informed by adaptation scholars, notably Linda Hutcheon (A Theory of Adaptation, 2006), who discredited fidelity to original sources as a focus for critical analysis. My purpose here is rather to investigate the process of “repetition without reduplication” by which Voltaire’s tale is adapted. I begin by asking why Candide enjoys such appeal: the tale’s continuing relevance; fortuitous similarities with comics; Voltaire’s taste in irony and parody; his mixing of high and low culture before postmodernism. I then methodically examine representative passages. Critics concur that Voltaire’s irony stems from contradictions between calamitous events and the optimistic manner of their recounting. I demonstrate how Sfar amplifies Voltaire’s effect: the mock-horror of his images, which clash with Voltaire’s euphemistic prose, fashion a visual dimension for the textual ironies. I go on to argue that Sfar ironically extends the high/low cultural debate to Voltaire and to himself: analogies with medieval psalters intimate that the erstwhile iconoclast’s work is sanctified, whereas the comic artist remains marginalised. My analysis further reveals how Meyran and Delcourt transpose Candide onto more conservative costume dramas without questioning the prevailing cultural hierarchy. I find that Meyran depicts catastrophes with fausse naiveté, thereby making visible contradictions between events and the way they are narrated. Turning to Delcourt, I examine how text-reduction removes verbal ironies, which are often reinstated in collaboration with images: disasters unfold in inappropriately tasteful panels, and irony arises from incongruities between verbal and visual information.