In a story that turns out to be both satisfying and cautionary, artist Robert Berry and the partners behind the creation of Ulysses “Seen,” a Web comic and reader’s guide based on Joyce’s commanding novel, rode a wave of media attention and popular exasperation to get Apple to relent and accept an iPad graphic application based on the work. After initially rejecting the Ulysses “Seen” iPad app because of minor nudity (apparently a penis and breasts), Apple came to its senses and admitted that it made a mistake.
Indeed while Apple’s decision to accept the Ulysses “Seen” iPad app—which is free to download—is a relief to many observers concerned about Apple's odd and often arbitrary attempts to shield the public from nudity, there are still questions about the company’s guidelines for what it will accept. It appears that nudity and even a little sex is OK if it takes place in a canonical literary masterpiece but very likely not if it’s an ordinary unheralded comic book. Indeed Ulysses “Seen” is only one of many digital publications rejected by Apple because of nudity. At the same time that Apple relented and accepted Berry’s Ulysses adaptation, the company did much the same with cartoonist Tom Bourden’s gay comics adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. Apple rejected the comic because of its depiction of two men kissing before reversing itself and accepting the book for the iTunes store after being held up to ridicule by the media and the public.
“We got a phone call from Apple,” said Berry describing Apple’s change of mind, “and they said to resubmit the app, unexpurgated. They said they wanted to move the process through so that the app would be available by Bloomsday.” Bloomsday is of course the single day in the life of the book’s central character, Leopold Bloom, depicted in the novel. Berry is based in Philadelphia, the location of the Rosenbach Museum which has Joyce’s original manuscript and also sponsors a live reading of the novel each year on June 16, Bloomsday.
It was one of those Bloomsday readings several years ago (along with a few pints of Guiness, Berry Jokes) that spurred him and his partners—Josh Levitas, Mike Barsanti and Chad Rutkowsky—to “the madness”; that is, an attempt to produce a true and serious comic book adaptation of Ulysses in tandem with a studious but easily understood guide to the literary allusions and historical references of Joyce’s text. The result is an unusual web comic that they hope will bring Joyce’s language and literary achievement to life for a new generation of readers and perhaps for an older one that may have given up on ever attempting to read it.
Berry has completed the first chapter of Ulysses “Seen, ” called Telemachus, it is about 68 pages and he thinks he can do about 2 chapters a year of 70 to 100 pages. At that rate, Berry said, it should take him about a decade to complete the novel. “We wanted to make a comic with hypertext links to a reader’s guide,” he said, “it’s a unique interface but the comic should stand on its own without the guide.” Berry said
“It’s a book that can’t really be done on film,” said Berry, “it’s Mt. Everest for a cartoonst. The imagery, the phrasing; Joyce wasn’t that visual and we didn’t take out much of the text. The only way to really do it; to capture the book’s plasticity of time, is to do it in comics.”
Berry is trained as a painter. “My paintings were like stories anyway and I began to think about making comics. Graphic novels were getting a lot of attention in the media.” He’s produced a crazy, hardboiled crime comic starring a demented rabbit called The Hammer, which won the monthly competition on Zuda.com, DC’s webcomics imprint, and was published online. Joining with his friends—Levitas, who handles web design and production, hand-lettered the comic (!); Barsanti is a Joyce scholar and Rutkowsky handles business and legal issues—the group has launched a publishing house called Throwaway Horse with the goal of “fostering understanding of public domain literary masterworks by joining the visual aid of the graphic novel with the explicatory aid of the internet.”
Berry said they planned the iPad app all along and formatted the pages in landscape to suit the tablet computer. But first they had to get past the Apple censors—not just the vetting the process that all iPhone and iPad applications have to go through to meet Apple’s strict standards for software—but Apple’s equally strict and frustratingly arbitrary prohibition on sexual depiction. But even after Apple’s initial rejection of the app—“we asked if we cold pixelate the images to block nudity, but they still rejected,” Berry said they agreed to reformat certain pages in the app to eliminate any nudity at all.
While unhappy with Apple’s original rejection, Berry emphasized that he did not characterize Apple’s actions as censorship. “It’s their store and a choice they make,” Berry explained, noting that while the images were changed in the app, it was still linked to the original unexpurgated images in the Web Comic. “You could always see the original pages on the site.”
Berry says the media attention—the controversy has been covered by everyone from the New York Times, NPR and Boing Boing to the New Yorker and the Irish Times—has drawn a lot of traffic to the site. And while the app is free, Berry said they group is looking to eventually monetize the site as well as use it to attract attract readers who are intimidated by the novel’s notorious difficulty. “We’re looking for it to be a springboard for education; maybe some kind of online course or reading group." Currently he makes money selling orginal artwork and, he said, by still working in a local restaurant making sandwiches from time to time. Throwaway Horse is also looking at using Kickstarter, the fundraising social media site, to raise funds.
Berry works closely with Barsanti, a PhD and Joyce scholar, who checks his story boards for literary and historical accuracy. “We talk about everything before I draw it but in the end I like to keep everything in my own head,” Berry said, “I try to figure out what’s spoken and what’s internal dialogue. It’s like staging a play.” Berry joked that, “Joyce fans are like trekkies. They know everything and I get a lot of feedback. You don’t want to make a mistake.”
Now that the Ulysses “Seen” iPad app has been accepted, Berry said “we’re just happy about it, penises and all.” But he’s also concerned about what it means to other artists and publishers. While the iPad has been hailed as a terrific platform for publishing and reading digital comics, Apple’s guidelines about what is acceptable seem to change based on who is submitting the work. If you’re submitting a literary masterpiece or if you’re Playboy magazine, you’re OK; otherwise there are no clear rules. Getting a publication accepted by Apple can be a dismaying and frustrating process.
“I have a bunch of emails from around the comics industry asking me about Apple’s guidelines,” said Berry. “I hope the result of all this is that more kinds of content can be seen on the iPad; but there really are no guidelines. Apple is running a store, not a library, so they get to say what they will sell. I would like to be able to tell others in the industry what Apple will carry but no one’s really sure.”
