Classic Scenes From Jules Verne

Classic scenes from the novels of Jules Verne become obvious when you look at comic book covers over the last eighty years. Artists focus on certain scenarios because of the visual excitement of those moments. Who can forget the giant squid from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or the dinosaurs in Journey to the Center of the Earth? I have collected some of those famous moments from the pages of the Spanish Joyas Literarias Juveniles. Created in 1970, it adapted 272 famous novels including the works of Jules Verne.

The covers of JLJ were done by Antonio Bernal (1924-?) He painted these images in acrylic.

“A Drama in the Air” (1851)

The Count of Chantelaine (1864)

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) offers a classic Northern image of the man with a knife taking on a polar bear.

A Prodigious Discovery (1867) was attributed to Jules Verne but was actually written by François-Armand Audoin.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1867) always features those darn dinos. Even Hugo Gernsback used the scene on the cover of Amazing Stories.

From the Earth to The Moon/Around the Moon (1868/1872) sometimes shows the giant cannon that hurls the projectile into space but more often shows the space travelers being amazed at what they see.

In Search of the Castaways (1868)

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871) is by far the most popular of all comic adaptations. The top covers are always of people diving in the water and facing danger, whether it is a shark or a squid.

“The Experiment of Dr. Ox” (1872) I am not sure what Dr. Ox is up to but it looks like no good.

The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South America (1872)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) gives us balloons and elephant rides but the train being attacked by Native Americans is most common.

The Fur Country (1873)

The Mysterious Island (1875) was a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The covers usually show the island and its mysteriousness. Sometimes a volcano goes off.

Michael Strogoff (1876) is one of Verne’s lesser known books. I take it Mikey knife-fought a lot of bears.

The Child of the Cavern (1877)

Dick Sand, Captain at Fifteen (1878)

Begum’s Fortune (1879)

The Steam House (1880)

The Green Ray (1882)

Godfrey Morgan (1882)

Keraban the Inflexible (1883)

The Vanished Diamond (1884)

The Archipelago of Fire (1884)

Robur the Conqueror/Master of the World (1886/1904) had two books but his attacking people from the air gets the cover every time.

North Against South (1887)

Two Years’ Vacation (1888)

Family Without a Name (1889)

Caesar Castabel (1890) More bear fights.

Carpathian Castle (1892) is a great novel, Verne’s version of a Gothic piece but with a scientific explanation.

Facing the Flag (1896)

Clovis Dardentor (1896)

The Adventures of an Irish Child (1897)

The Antarctic Mystery (1897) was a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Lovecraft would do his own version of a sequel in “At the Mountains of Madness (1930).

The Mighty Orinoco (1898)

The Village in the Treetops (1901) was Verne’s response to the idea of evolution. He was not a fan. It reads like a proto-Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.

The Kip Brothers (1902)

Travel Scholarships (1903)

The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1905)

The Golden Volcano (1906)

The Chase of the Golden Meteor (1908)

The Danube Pilot (1908)

 

The Secret of William Storitz (1910)

If you have never read a Jules Verne novel (and I suppose today that isn’t so unlikely), these covers would be a good catalogue of the best bits you will enjoy. Some fans don’t realize the number of historical adventures he wrote, far more than Science Fiction pieces. These classic scenes from Jules Verne all share an excitement that the original readers of the Voyages Fantasique experienced, just as Walt Disney, Georges Melies and Ray Harryhausen fans many years later did in the movies. These are “classic” stories because they are still fun to read.