Everything is Illuminated

Papercutz has borrowed well to kick off its rejuvenated line, and a sneak peek at its forthcoming "Alice in Wonderland" proves that its freshly commissioned work is no less dazzling. It had better be. Half a century ago, Classics Illustrated competed only with superheroes in spandex, Archie and Jughead and Little Lulu. It ruled its particular niche in more or less lonely solitude. Since the original company shuttered in 1971, comics have become a recognized art form with a full complement of resident geniuses as various as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman and Mariane Satrapi. The ways to pursue what the late comics genius Will Eisner described as "sequential art" continue to prove limitless. Marvel recently introduced a sleek classics line. There's also a splendidly inventive series called Graphic Classics that devotes each issue to several stories by an individual author (Arthur Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson), with each story illustrated by a different artist—and in its adaptation of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," it cleverly employs two artists: one to illustrate the criminal career of Hyde, the other to illuminate the confession of Dr. Jekyll. There's even a set of Shakespeare's plays rendered in the style of Japanese manga comics —but hark!—with Shakespeare's dialogue intact.

You can't go wrong with any of these series. But the old question posed by strict teachers and worried parents still hangs in the air: shouldn't you be reading the originals and not wasting your time on what used to be called "funny books"? For anyone who grew up reading the illustrated Melville and Hugo—that would be me—the answer is, maybe not. After all, one of the hardest parts of growing up was discovering that great fiction did not necessarily come with illustrations.

For kids who came of age after World War II, Classics Illustrated was our first encounter with stolen—or, put more mildly, borrowed—goods. How many kids, from the '40s through the '60s, first encountered Captain Ahab or Jean Valjean or Madame Defarge in the pages of those comics with the unforgettable yellow logo in the top left corner of the cover? Did we know who Charles Dickens was, or Victor Hugo, or Herman Melville? Probably not. We just knew that these were good stories, to be read and reread and passed around. We did not care particularly where they came from, if we thought about that at all. Somebody named Hugo wrote "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," but he didn't draw the pictures in our comics, any more than he had anything to do with the old black-and-white movie that we sat through every time it came on TV. Which suggests an intriguing esthetic principle: might we say that a truly great novel or movie or play is one that so thoroughly works its way into the culture that we forget who created it in the first place? Are these not ultimately the most potent stories, the ones that belong to everyone, and no one? It's about as close as we get to myth these days.

To their credit, the artists and writers who created the Classics Illustrated versions were—and still are—a lot more scrupulous than their audience when it came to source material. They took few liberties with their adaptations. What they did was an act of, if not love, then certainly respect for the original. My senior year in high school, I took a test on "A Tale of Two Cities," a book I had somehow failed to read. What I had read, years before, was the Classics Illustrated version—read it so often that I had the story pretty much by heart. I aced the test.

I felt genuinely guilty ever since about what I did, and I never did it again. (Although I still think force-feeding Dickens to high-school students is a dumb thing to do.) But if I hadn't devoured those comics as a child, would I have grown up to be a voracious reader? I certainly never took the advice at the end of every comic to visit my local library or bookstore and read the original work—at least not immediately. But Classics Illustrated taught me the value of good stories that I otherwise would not have read at all. As an adult, I am much more mindful of authorship and questions about the integrity of the text, issues that children don't care about. But then, children are more ruthless about what they consider entertaining. They don't love books because they think they should. They love stories that deliver, and Classics Illustrated always had the goods. Looks like it still does.

© 2008