Comics in Orwell, Orwell in comics

George Orwell was always interested in popular culture and some of the essays he wrote in the 1940s discuss children's magazines and popular illustrations. He was never interested in comics, however, and even reacted with some annoyance to the possibility that an adaptation of his Animal Farm would be accompanied by illustrations. British comics, largely humorous and aimed almost exclusively at a children's audience until the Second World War, clearly did not interest Orwell, whereas Orwell and his works interested comics authors as early as the 1950s but especially from the 1980s onwards, when references to Soviet reality began to disappear in the comic book adaptations of 1984 and in the works influenced by it, to recuperate the denunciation of totalitarianism that was at the very heart of the novel.