Alternative Francophone vol.1, 8(2015):XX-XX http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/af This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License 1 Postcolonial Interjections: Jean-Philippe Stassen Illustrates Heart of Darkness and We Killed Mangy-Dog Michelle Bumatay Willamette University In 2006, internationally acclaimed Belgian cartoonist Jean-Philippe Stassen produced new editions of two well-known books from the European colonial era — Joseph Conrad’s Cœur des ténèbres [Heart of Darkness] 1 first published over the course of three months in the spring of 1899 and Luìs Bernardo Honwana’s Nous avons tué le Chien Teigneux [We Killed Mangy-Dog] 2 originally published in a collection of Honwana’s short stories i n 1964. These new publications feature original illustrations by Stassen and can be seen as continuing a larger trend in which established artists illustrate classic literature to showcase their talents such as Gustave Doré’s treatments of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Rabelais’s La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, both of which were also later illustrated by Salvador Dalí. While these projects were often commissioned works (in the case of Doré), they were also opportunities to reconfigure popular cultural icons (in the case of Dalí). By selecting, imagining, and illustrating scenes from well-known texts, these artists, and Stassen in turn, comment on the original texts. Unlike adaptations that alter original source material into another genre, Stassen’s treatments of Heart of Darkness and We Killed Mangy-Dog function more as a commentary across time and space 3 . This article considers how Stassen enters into dialogue with the original texts through his interjections, thus exploring gaps and short-comings in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and silences and the subtle power of the piercing eye in Honwana’s allegorical We Killed Mangy-Dog. In contrast to adaptations that creatively transpose original texts into new genres and mediums, these new editions of Heart of Darkness and We Killed Mangy-Dog, apart from being translated into French, do not change Conrad’s 1 All translations of Heart of Darkness, unless otherwise stated, come from Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, by Joseph Conrad and edited with an introduction by Mortan Dauwen Zabel (1959). 2 All English translations of Nous avons tué le Chien Teigneux are my own. 3 In contrast to the two texts considered in this article, L’île au trésor (2012), a bande dessinée written by Sylvain Venayre and illustrated by Stassen, is an actual adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novel, Treasure Island, originally published in its entirety in 1883. In addition to converting the novel into a graphic narrative, the adaptation also updates the narrative by transposing it to contemporary France.