The classic literary canon meets the comics artists, illustrators, and other artists who have remade reading in Russ Kick's magisterial, three-volume, full-color "The Graphic Canon," volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Volume 3 brings to life the literature of the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, including a Sherlock Holmes mystery, an H.G. Wells story, an illustrated guide to the Beat writers, a one-act play from Zora Neale Hurston, a disturbing meditation on "Naked Lunch," Rilke's soul-stirring "Letters to a Young Poet," Anais Nin's diaries, the visions of Black Elk, the heroin classic "The Man With the Golden Arm "(published four years before William Burroughs' "Junky"), and the postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker, Raymond Carver, and Donald Barthelme.
The towering works of modernism are here--T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," Yeats's "The Second Coming" done as a magazine spread, "Heart of Darkness," stories from Kafka, "The" "Voyage Out "by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce's masterpiece, "Ulysses," and his short story "Araby" from "Dubliners," rare early work from Faulkner and Hemingway (by artists who have drawn for Marvel), and poems by Gertrude Stein and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
You'll also find original comic versions of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, Flannery O'Connor, and Saki (manga style), plus adaptations of "Lolita "(and everyone said it couldn't be done ), "The Age of Innocence," "Siddhartha "and "Steppenwolf "by Hermann Hesse, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes, "One" "Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Last Exit to Brooklyn," J.G. Ballard's "Crash," and photo-dioramas for "Animal" "Farm "and "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Feast your eyes on new full-page illustrations for "1984," "Brave New" "World," "Waiting for Godot," "One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Bell Jar," "On the Road," "Lord of the Flies," "The" "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," and three Borges stories.
Robert Crumb's rarely seen adaptation of "Nausea "captures Sartre's existential dread. Dame Darcy illustrates Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece, "Blood Meridian," universally considered one of the most brutal novels ever written and long regarded as unfilmable by Hollywood. Tara Seibel, the only female artist involved with the Harvey Pekar Project, turns in an exquisite series of illustrations for "The Great Gatsby." And then there's the moment we've been waiting for: the first graphic adaptation from Kurt Vonnegut's masterwork, "Slaughterhouse-Five." Among many other gems.