Everything is Illuminated

Memory lane is often a dead-end street, all promise and no delivery. So when I received copies of newly published Classics Illustrated comics, I wasn't sure I wanted to open them, because I was afraid they wouldn't be nearly as good as I remembered. The predecessors of those books were the touchstones of my childhood, which I spent reading and rereading the comics versions of novels by Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper—the list was tilted overwhelmingly toward boys, it being an article of faith in the comic-book business that girls were not good customers. Between 1941 and 1971, the lifetime of the original company that produced those comics, millions of kids read them—and sometimes not just kids: between 5 million and 10 million copies were shipped to GIs overseas during World War II.

Along with Lincoln Logs and chemistry sets, Classics Illustrated was part of that goofy but well-intentioned trend in the mid-20th century that sought both to educate and entertain America's youth. Each issue contained a retelling of a well-known novel, supplied facts about the author and also included—I am not making this up—a biography of a scientist or inventor and the stirring tale of a brave dog. There were also issues on science and history and fairy tales. If that sounds dreadful—it wasn't. I should know. That was where I first discovered just how good stories could be.

Now bound in hardcovers, and selling for $15—a hundred times the original cover price—the new Classics Illustrated books don't closely resemble their predecessors, whose style was generally uniform, more or less like Prince Valiant in the funny papers. (Note to purists: if it's the old versions you hanker for, they're still being published by Jack Lake Productions.) The new series will use a different artist with every book, and the styles will vary radically. If the first two, "Great Expectations" and "The Wind in the Willows," are any indication, Papercutz, the company now licensing the brand, has set very high standards for its new series.

The first two books in the new line have been previously published. Rick Geary's "Great Expectations" first appeared in 1990 as part of a previous attempt to revive the Classics Illustrated imprint. Geary ambitiously tries to render Dickens's great novel down to 56 pages, and the result is a visually crowded work, with lots of practically postage-stamp-size panels necessary to squeeze in this hideously complicated story. The book reminded me of film director John Ford's observation that it's easier to make a movie out of a short story than a novel, because then the question becomes how to enrich the tale, not how to cut it. It's a measure of Geary's talent that the story of the orphan Pip and his search for his anonymous benefactor still manages to read easily and swiftly, but he is probably not the best choice to illustrate Dickens. Temperamentally, he's simply not dark enough. His version of "Great Expectations" misses most of the danger and all of the gloom. Still, you can't fault him for lack of ambition.

"The Wind in the Willows " is something else again. First published in four volumes in France in 1996, Michel Plessix's rendering of Kenneth Grahame's story is a visual masterpiece—Rat, Mole, Toad and Badger have met their Michelangelo. Every frame is drawn and colored with meticulous care. Every elegant page is composed with a dual purpose: to enchant the eye and to further the various narratives that make up the loose plot. Plessix knows how to advance and retard the story's pace. He knows just when to zoom in and when to pull back for a wide shot. The new illustrated version prompted a vivid memory of many long hours spent lying on my bed, spellbound by the adventures of D'Artagnan and Ahab and John Silver. Plessix's "The Wind in the Willows" is a book to get lost in—and "lost in" implies, if not a completely different world, then at least a place as alien as it is beguiling. Plessix reminded me that Classics Illustrated was the way I got in.

Plessix's version isn't better than Grahame's—it's just a different way of telling the story. They're not mutually exclusive. You can choose both—or either—and not go amiss. I sat down with Plessix's and Grahame's versions, read them side by side, both for the first time, and I can't say that one is better, other than the significant fact that Grahame dreamed it all up in the first place (although the fact that we wouldn't have Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" without Shakespeare's does nothing to diminish Mendelssohn). Their charms are different, but each man has created a wonderful world, one out of words and the other in images.