Ever since completing my comics adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I have wanted to do something similar with Eliot’s most famous and celebrated poem, “The Waste Land.” But besides being extremely complex and often difficult to interpret,”The Waste Land” (First published 1922) is very long, and this always deterred me from getting started. But in recent times, with a historical situation that in many ways mirrors that in which Eliot was writing, with a society emerging from a vast global collective trauma–made up of innumerable individual personal traumas–and a disquieting future looming on the horizon, this latent desire pressingly reasserted itself.
Finally it occurred to me that I could after all begin to tackle the project by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable units. Near the end of last year I resolved to adapt, for the time being, only the first section of the five sections into which the poem is subdivided, “The Burial of the Dead.” Today I am posting the first page from this work in progress. Every week for the next sixteen weeks, I am hoping to continue to publish a new page from the planned 16-page comic.
Next week: Summer surprises us!
julian peters comics 
So good to see you working on TSE again, Julian!!This will be helpful to scores of literature students! Thank you.
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Thank you, LTK! I hope so!
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Like first spring and then summer you rise from the loam with fresh stem and greenery. I think I see a bud… can a blossom be far behind?
-j.
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Let us hope! I do sometimes think I feel the faint stirrings of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower! 🙂
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Fantastic, wonderful, can’t wait for it all.
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Thank you, thank you! Same here 🙂
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Love your thought-provoking work and your choices of literature. It’s a joy to read and consider/contemplate.
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Thank you! That’s really nice to hear
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Thank you! TS Eliot is my absolute favorite… to have any of his works depicted by your art is a gift to us all!
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Aww you’re kind words are a wonderful gift to me!
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Yuck! But also brilliant and very useful with my students. So, many thanks! and carry on–lots of images to play with. Dr Charles W Spurgeon, professor emeritus
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Thank you so much! I hope your students find it helpful/interesting
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Thank you! What an appropriate gift to share at the outset of National Poetry Month! Eliot’s opening line echoes the poems often considered the first examples of Poetry in English, Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and “Summer is a Coming In ( lude sing Cuckoo). Though now a century old, it is as relevant as ever. This graphic form will make this poem so much more accessible and resonant for any reader of the poem, especially a student encountering for the first time.Your work continues to be a blessed gift for both teachers and lovers of poetry.
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Thank you, that’s very kind of you to say. And it does feel to me that the poem has almost been gaining in relevance in recent years
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I’ve been hoping for this since your Prufrock – thanks Julian!
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Thank you to you! I would also really like to do “The Hollow Men” one day, but one thing at a time!
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