Review: Three Collections of Classic Adaptations
Comics don’t have to be bad for you, you know. They can be edifying and uplifting, partaking of the greatest glories of the finest books even written. At least, that’s what the purveyors of various adaptations of “the great books” – curiously, nearly all of which were conveniently out of copyright and thus didn’t require any licensing fees – have claimed for the past fifty-some years. I have before me three very different books that all adapt mostly old and out of copyright works for a modern audience, so let’s take a look at what’s going on these days…
Classics Illustrated: The Raven & Other Poems
By Edgar Allan Poe; Illustrated by Gahan Wilson
NBM/Papercutz, May 2009, $9.95
Classics Illustrated is the longest-running brand-name in the adapting-old-books space, dating back to 1941 (when the line was launched as Classic Comics), and was the educational comic of choice for an entire generation of parents (and the crib-sheet for their generation of children) until it ended, for the first time, in 1971. There have been periodic attempts to re-ignite the brand since then – this particular book was originally published during one of those attempts, by First Comics around 1990 – but none have been as broadly successful as the main thirty-year sequence from the Gilberton Company.
This particular book, [[[The Raven and Other Poems]]], is an outlier in the Classics Illustrated series, since it doesn’t adapt and abridge a single long-form story (usually a novel, with some plays or other works) into comics, but instead reprints, in their entirety, nine Poe poems with illustrations by Wilson. So it’s not really a graphic novel at all, but the kind of illustrated collection that any publisher for younger readers might publish. (It’s also quite short, at only 48 pages of Poe-Wilson material.)
Aside from “The Raven,” these are primarily shorter Poe verses, mixing his best-known lines (“Annabel Lee,” “The Conqueror Worm”) with poems that only Poe devotees will recognize, like “Lines on Ale” and “The Sleeper.” It’s inherently a small, scattershot selection, but it does give a decent sense of what Poe was like as a poet – morbid, ostentatiously wordy, with that galumphingly even rhythm through his long lines – so that new readers can decide if they like him or not. (And – who knows? – there’s always a new generation of morbid goth/emo kids to glom onto Poe, so it’s not the forlorn hope it might seem.)
Wilson is the perfect choice to illustrate Poe; he’s spent his long illustrative career in the realms of the humorously macabre, and his lines can be just as grotesque – and as carefully, deliberately so – as Poe’s. This isn’t new Wilson work, of course, but it’s a strong collection of Wilson illustrations, and it’s great to have them back in print.
Today is December 7th, a day that will live in infamy as the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that ushered the United States into the second World War.
The real winner of the summer movie sweepstakes may well be motorcycle manufacturer Ducati, which managed to have their sleek cycles appear in two of the box office behemoths: 
We just got an alert from our friends at Warner Bros. that on Saturday, at 6 p.m. PST, Terminator Salvation director McG will particiate in a discussion with fans via BD-Live. Here’s the official release:
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All good things must come to an end, and they’ll be ending at pretty much the same time here as in the UK.
Manga-format comics have a tropism
I admit to having missed [[[Night at the Museum]]] despite the recommendations of friends. As a result, sitting down to watch 
