“A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story” starring — Mistress Scrooge?!?

José-Luis Munuera is back again, this time doing a single album retelling of Charles Dickens’ classic, “A Christmas Carol”. This time, he’s added the twist of genderswapping a few characters, starting with Mistress Scrooge in the lead.

This is a smart retelling of a classic tale with a very strong visual, smart creative choices, and a genderswap that provides an angle that modern audiences eat up with a spoon.

In the end, it’s still the story of a ruthless Scrooge and how that character’s heart grows three sizes in one scary night. Sort of.

Europe Comics’ translation of this book in time for Christmas 2022 was well-timed. This review, two months later, is not. C’est la vie.

Bah. Humbug. Credits!

You Know the Story — Or Do You?

Scrooge is a miserly financier of some sort, who cares only about immediate profits rather than people. Scrooge wants the legacy of a business that can be sold for maximum gains, rather than one that provides a useful service to people and helps its employees enjoy their lives.

One Christmas Eve night, four ghosts visit Scrooge to show her what’s going on and what’s really meaningful. Suddenly, Scrooge is a changed person: Happy, people-oriented, free-spending, etc.

That’s the bones of the story, and Jose-Luis Munuera hits them strongly in this album. He starts with a four-page sequence of Scrooge walking through town and delivering a blistering soliloquy against both charitable giving and children, in general. I did some quick searches on the original text and didn’t find it in there. I thought it was a great intro for the character in that it quickly established her point of view and was filled with character and sharp, biting commentary.

It’s completely over the top, but delivered with such deadpan seriousness and severity that you’ll instantly hate Scrooge, but also love the honesty and surety of the opinion.

The scene is the perfect book-setter — it happens before the story begins and defines a character perfectly.

You’re not that far into the book and you’re already rooting for the comeuppance you know Scrooge is going to get in this book. Yet, by the end of the book, you’ll also realize some of it is her own pain from childhood.

And, of course, it also leads to the revelation that this book’s Scrooge is a woman. OK, that’s not a huge revelation since it’s right there on the cover, but as a piece of storytelling and dramatization, it’s super well done.

After that, we get into the meat of the book which has the same skeleton as Dickens’ novel. The ghost of Marley and then three ghosts take Scrooge on an adventure, including a scene at Tiny Tim’s house and one at Scrooge’s grave. Scrooge sees the light and tries immediately do better.

It’s all the little details that separate this book from the usual rote adaptation.

First of all, there’s Munuera’s art. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Second, Scrooge’s final change is far less severe than usual. Most adaptations of the book go wild with how much Scrooge has changed. Munuera’s Scrooge has that change and goes through the motions, but it’s a much more reasonable transformation. This Scrooge is less effusive and more of an anonymous helper where help is needed. I like that interpretation of the story — it’s more practical than spiritual, more realistic than fantastic.

Third, this story is genderswapped in more than one way. In Dickens’ story, it’s Scrooge and his nephew and an ex-fiancee that inform the story. Munuera reverses all those roles. It’s still a bad father that causes most of the damage, but it’s the niece of Mistress Scrooge that provides a hopeful and helpful family member for the story. And it’s an ex-fiancé that shows just how calculated Scrooge could be.

The genderswap’s biggest difference is in the way Scrooge’s father is shown, as not just being a hateful and bad father, but also an outright misogynist who makes decisions based on what a woman’s station ought to be in that time period.

There’s also a less successful attempt to make the comparison between descriptions of successful men and women in the business world. I knew this scene was going to come up in the book as soon as I saw the swap. You know the cliche — a successful man is some variation of strong and determined, while the same woman is seen as a mean bitch.

That point doesn’t work as well in this story. Nobody reads Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and thinks anything of Ebeneezer Scrooge other than being a mean son of a bitch whose dedication to money blinds him to what’s really important in life. The people think the same of Elizabeth Scrooge for all the same reasons. That IS the character. It’s not the patriarchy this time. It’s that she really is, as Cratchit’s wife says in the book, an ogre.

The Art of Munuera and Sedyas

If you’ve read Munuera’s previous work, you’ll get what you’d expect here. It’s Munuera’s cartoony character figures set in front of more realistically drawn backgrounds.

Munuera is again joined by colorist Sedyas to finish the style. Backgrounds are mostly monochromatic and often with a bit of a watercolored look. The characters pop off those backgrounds with contrasting colors that have watercolored-style shadow work colored on them. Additional special coloring effects are added in as well to accommodate things like the glow of a ghost.

Munuera is definitely drawing for the colors he expects with this book. This isn’t Sedyas inserting himself into the art and trying to drown out the art. It’s detailed work that is planned from the start, freeing up Munuera from worrying too much about drawing those other things that can be better handled on the computer afterward.

Having said all that, I’d love to see him go back to something closer to “The Campbells” again, where it’s more cartoony overall. I’d probably get that if they translated any of his Zorglub books, though it seems these more serious books get the more painterly style. I still enjoy it, but I miss his cartoony antics and style.

Recommended?

Yes, for sure. It’s probably not the book you may want to read right now. Maybe you’ll be more in the mood during a Christmas-in-July phase of your year, or something after Halloween. Either way, do give it a try. It’s Munuera, so you know it’s pretty, but it also does some other successful things with the well-known story to keep things interesting.

You can buy it on Izneo.