Dante's Divine Comedy

Starred review from July 5, 2010
Famed artist and graphic designer Chwast has turned his talents to the graphic novel form for the first time, and we can all be happy about it. In a highly compressed version of Dante's Divine Comedy, Chwast takes us on a whirlwind tour of hell, purgatory, and heaven. With his signature mix of humor, artistry, and high-level design, he conveys a breathtaking amount of information in clear black and white line drawings. One graph illustrates "reasons for different levels of punishment," with sins ranging from "no self-control" (deemed "not so bad") to "insane brutality" (which is "terrible"). In another, the levels and regions of purgatory are laid out in an ascending birthday cake format. Much of the book is beautiful, with page design showing naked sinners tossed in a wind of words, a two-page spread of men and snakes wrapped in writhing battle, or a large flower made of angels as they fly from God. Dante himself is portrayed as a pipe-smoking detective type in sunglasses and a trench coat, while his guide, Virgil, wears a porkpie hat and wire-rimmed spectacles with his suit. It all works seamlessly as Chwast does a stunning job of telling Dante's story in his own brilliant style.

Starred review from July 1, 2010

In his first graphic novel, one classic artist channels another.

With all due respect to Dante, this is Chwast's Divine Comedy, one that uses the poet's masterwork as a launching pad for a flight to the creative heavens. An influential, revolutionary illustrator, Chwast (Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast, 2009, etc.) meets his match in one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Distilling Dante's three volumes into little more than 100 pages of large panels (many of them page-sized), he adheres to the tri-partite structure of the original without overburdening the spirit with reverence. Chwast's Dante has a jaunty fedora and a pipe clenched between his teeth; his Virgil is a bespectacled Brit with a bowler; his Beatrice has the beauty of a classic Hollywood glamour girl. Thus, just as Dante wrote in the Italian vernacular of his day at a time when Latin was the language of philosophy and religion, Chwast has recast the work in today's vernacular of graphic narrative, sacrificing the literary poetry of the original for visual imagery that is thoroughly accessible. From the boiling river of blood and the rain of excrement in the circles of hell through the ascent into heaven's ineffable beauty (as with Dante, the transitional stage of purgatory is less compelling than the extremes), the artist makes the Divine Comedy irresistibly comic and inspirationally transcendent.

An achievement kindred to R. Crumb's Genesis (2009), though less literal and more compressed.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2010
Although legendary graphic designer and illustrator Chwast is pushing 80, he is still seeking new fields to conquer. For his first graphic novel, he tackles no less daunting a task than adapting Dantes epic poem into comics format. Chwast hews closely to the original: guided by the Roman poet Virgil, the narrator travels through the circles of hell, meets Lucifer, traverses purgatory, and goes through the spheres of heaven before coming face-to-face with God himself. What Chwast contributes to the tale is an off-kilter, anachronistic approachDante is a pipe-smoking mug in a trench coat and shades, and Virgil sports a derby and caneand, most of all, his distinctively simple, whimsically blunt drawing style and elegantly economical sense of design and composition, which makes each page its own visual treat. Chwasts straightforward version holds wide appeal for readers wanting an experience less demanding than Dantes originalits a Classics Illustrated with genuine panacheas well as grown-up fans of the 30-plus childrens books that Chwast has designed and illustrated over the years.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)