In that first adaptation, his artist focus is on using color to set the mood and tone of the story. His 2013 take on the same poem is much more graphically driven as he forces you to experience the narrator’s desire much more vividly. In 1974, Lenore was a vision, a lover kept away from him by the “midnight dreary.” The few times we see here, she’s moving farther and farther into the distance with every consecutive panel as the narrator slowly drives himself crazy waiting for her to appear. With the 2013 version, Corben throws a touch of humor into the story right on the first page, announcing that this may be something different. “‘Tis some visitor, tapping at my chamber door–,” the narrator says just before Mag the Hag, Corben’s host character for his recent horror stuff, chimes in with “The weather has put young Arnold [the narrator] in a melancholy mood, leading him to grimly narrate his own evening in verse.” And then Corben cuts back to the story where Arnold is beckoned back into bed by the lovely Lenore.
The two takes on “The Raven” are so different because of how Corben exposes us to the psychological terrorism of the raven. In 1976, Corben focuses on the claustrophobic aspect of the narrator’s desire. The home of the narrator presses down more and more as he falls deeper into despair, searching for his missing Lenore. Corben is showing us the world getting smaller and colder as Lenore disappears into the distance, creating this sense of isolation and loneliness. The physicality of Corben’s artwork, where every shape and every color has density, works on us to make us feel as pinned down as the narrator. We become as oppressed by this story because the artwork is making our world cumbersome just as the narrator’s paranoia are making his.
The artwork’s physicality is still present in the 2013 version but Corben uses it much differently. All of the players in Corben’s new version are more active, more participants in the story than they were in the first one where their environment pushed down on them. Oddly, there’s little change in how Corben portrays the narrator but Lenore looks quite different in this new one. Gone is her girlish beauty and instead we get an image of her that’s more physical and sensual. Corben doesn’t use the colors to manipulate us as much but keeps us disoriented by flying around the page and using quick, violent panels to force us into the here and now of Albert’s madness.
While the coloring is maybe less menacing in the new version, watching the way that Corben bends light and shadows around his characters creates the physicality that makes the violence of this version more shocking. He pushes it as well by the way his distorts his figures, often making them look like a warped reflection of a warped reflection. He elongates, pushes the perspective and distorts characters in ways that are never unrealistic but are often grotesque. He then lights them with heavy contrasts, creating depth and roundness to his figures. His artwork, both in 1974 and in 2013, looks sculpted. He can create action and oppression on the page because he can making you believe that you are looking at three dimensional objects on a two dimensional page.
As different as the two versions are, the last page in both are almost identical as the first time around, Corben hit on the perfect ending. In the new one, he gets a bit more graphic as the raven becomes something more than just a bird, it becomes some kind of demonic creature sent to torment poor Albert. But both ravens transform into clues of where the missing Lenore is, raising many questions about Poe’s narrator, his mental state and his past actions. The ending almost perfectly matches Poe’s lines (“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,/And the lamp-light o’rer him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;”) but Corben takes the raven’s shadow and twists it into something full of heavy symbolism and power where the battle for the narrator’s Lenore becomes a struggle for his very soul.
Almost 40 years apart, Corben’s two versions of “The Raven” show the best of the artist. There are plenty of artists that can draw an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe poem but there are almost none other who can make you feel the physical sense of the narrator’s struggle and psychosis that Richard Corben can. His approach to art, both then and now, sucks the reader into his characters’ delusions and struggles. Whether it is through the colors, the image, the ugliness or the violence, Corben’s artwork works on you the same way that Edgar Allan Poe’s words do: they pull you into them, to the point where you experience everything as more than words and pictures. You experience them as reality because the poet and the artist wrap you in their worlds and work their magic into your soul.