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A review by mattycakesbooks
The Graphic Canon, Vol. 2: From Kubla Khan to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Gris Grimly, Kim Deitch, Dame Darcy, Russ Kick, Maxon Crumb, Molly Kiely, John Percellino, S. Clay Wilson, Seth Tobocman, Megan Kelso, John Coulthart
4.0
Just as good as the last one. This covers probably my least favorite era in literature - the 18th and 19th centuries - but it still has a few really beautiful adaptations, notably Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn.
A thought about the era: I recently read Jane Eyre and Les Miserables, two of the books adapted in this collection, and it's impossible to miss how much attention is given to minutia and detail, with Les Mis especially. My theory is that this was the first era where storytelling was dominated by the literate rather than the oral tradition. This isn't to say that there wasn't an oral tradition still, just that it was mostly overshadowed by actual books and the expansion of literacy. Books lend themselves to longer, more vivid description than we normally would hear in a spoken format, so the authors went somewhat insane with the concept and, like in the case of Hugo, wrote a hundred goddamn pages on sewers. I know that the story adapts itself to the format of the storytelling - look at television and movies - but it seems like there's always a period where people haven't quite gotten the hang of it. Film-makers eventually caught onto how to do it particularly well around the 70's and 80's, and television has just started creating brilliant works of art in the past ten years or so.
Anyway, that's probably an underdeveloped theory, but the basic point is that the literature in the 18th and early 19th century was long and windy and was begging for Twain and Hemingway to come and chop it into something short, direct, and incredible.
A thought about the era: I recently read Jane Eyre and Les Miserables, two of the books adapted in this collection, and it's impossible to miss how much attention is given to minutia and detail, with Les Mis especially. My theory is that this was the first era where storytelling was dominated by the literate rather than the oral tradition. This isn't to say that there wasn't an oral tradition still, just that it was mostly overshadowed by actual books and the expansion of literacy. Books lend themselves to longer, more vivid description than we normally would hear in a spoken format, so the authors went somewhat insane with the concept and, like in the case of Hugo, wrote a hundred goddamn pages on sewers. I know that the story adapts itself to the format of the storytelling - look at television and movies - but it seems like there's always a period where people haven't quite gotten the hang of it. Film-makers eventually caught onto how to do it particularly well around the 70's and 80's, and television has just started creating brilliant works of art in the past ten years or so.
Anyway, that's probably an underdeveloped theory, but the basic point is that the literature in the 18th and early 19th century was long and windy and was begging for Twain and Hemingway to come and chop it into something short, direct, and incredible.