Do you need foreknowledge about Bulgakov and Woland? Making Juliane Blank’s comics adaptation parameters more flexible

Adaptation (case) studies have long been criticized for their lack of theoretical basis and/or analytical tools that could make the observations of their authors more transferable to other, comparable case studies. Substantially younger than film (adaptation) studies, the prospering discipline of comics (adaptation) studies can boast, since 2015, the existence of Juliane Blank’s Literaturadaptionen im Comic: Ein modulares Analysemodell (Comics Adaptations of Literature: A Modular Analysis Model). It is this 404-page book that gave rise to the present article, with a threefold aim: (1) to acquaint a larger audience with Juliane Blank’s comprehensive parameter set for studying comics adaptations of literary works; (2) to elaborate on this set and regroup the parameters into several clusters, in order to make them more practically useful (also for, e.g., translation scholars, scholars of narrative cohesion and those interested in reading experiences); and (3) to introduce some possible case studies – one about foreknowledge – on four comics adaptations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which may benefit from the (regrouping in) clusters presented in (2)