The Graphic Canon, Volume 1

September 15, 2012

This lavish collection spanning four millennia includes 190 literary adaptations organized into three volumes. Besides the expected choices, this first volume's culturally diverse works include a pre-Columbian Incan play, Tang Dynasty verses, a Japanese Noh play, Rumi poetry, and an ingeniously rendered sliver of the Mahabharata. Most of the selections are modest-sized abridgements or excerpts, 80 percent new material and the rest reprints. Quality and artistry all convey the unique flavors of the originals, although not all will appeal to everyone. Perhaps Kick's visual banquet is best appreciated as a seductive howdy-do that could send readers to the originals, or to a longer graphic version. The set also makes an inspiring sampler of graphic innovation for art students and those interested in the comics format. VERDICT The trilogy should occupy a prominent place in all adult graphic novel collections. Note that a few selections (e.g., Lysistrata) are sexually explicit, and high school libraries should carefully evaluate suitability. Perhaps Kick's project will spur substantive quality adaptations of many more literary works, which would further benefit libraries and classrooms.--M.C.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2012
Classic literature gets desterilized with the help of the modern world's most daring graphic artists. In this first of three volumes, editor Kick (100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know, 2008, etc.), better known for rabble-rousing at Disinfo.com, collects an incredible variety of graphic adaptations of oral tales, plays, essays, sonnets and letters. Starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with Hamlet, this meaty slab is laced with more wit, beauty, social commentary and shock than one might expect from a book tailor-made for college classrooms. The expected suspects are all here in excerpted or abridged form, including The Odyssey, Beowulf and The Divine Comedy. But there are unexpected entries, too. Tania Schrag turns in a delightfully explicit depiction of the Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, while Vicki Nerino delivers a raw take on an explicit yarn usually expunged from The Arabian Nights. Noah Patrick Pfarr turns John Donne's "The Flea" into an elaborate lesbian tryst. Robert Crumb does his characteristically bizarre take on James Boswell's London Journal, with high debauchery intact. More unpredictable entries are drawn from Native American folktales, a Japanese play, Chinese poetry and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Serious treatments are given to King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not to mention a museum-worthy portrait by Eric Johnson of a minor character from Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queen. Some of the artistic heavy hitters in this volume include a selection from Seymour Chwast's outstanding adaptation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Rick Geary's take on the Book of Revelation, Peter Kuper's blistering take on Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and the legendary Will Eisner's view of Don Quixote from his 2003 graphic novel The Last Knight. The infamous Molly Crabapple closes the book with rich portraits of The Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont from Dangerous Liaisons. If artists, as British sculptor Anish Kapoor famously said, make mythologies, then this volume is genuinely a marriage of equals.

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Starred review from April 15, 2012
Does it seem that collecting thousands of years' worth of world literature in highly abridged form would be somewhat daft? Why, then, is Kick's gloriously ambitious attempt to collect sequential-art adaptations of those works into three massive volumes such a uniquely powerful piece of art? Because, while it can serve as a study of cultures and histories or as a pedagogical tool (as the source lists, further-reading section, and four indexes attest), what this first volume does best is showcase the extraordinary potential of the art form itself. From the literal adaptations of Gareth Hinds' three selections (The Odyssey, Beowulf, Gulliver's Travels) to Sanya Glisic's highly impressionistic take on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from the classic style of Will Eisner's Don Quixote to experiments like Edie Fake's stained-glass interpretation of the The Visions of St. Teresa of Avila and newcomer Isabel Greenberg's silent Hagoramo, there is a new visual idea on nearly every turn of the page. Through the reprinted and newly produced work of 59 (mainly American) adapters and 58 adapted titles, this is not only a survey of the world's diverse artistic past, but also a breathtaking glimpse of this young medium's incredible future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)