"In The Graphic Canon, the world’s literature is reimagined as comics and visual art, and with it the editor, Russ Kick, has struck a chord."
—New York Times Sunday Book Review (Editor's Choice)

“A must-have anthology for those who wish to lose themselves utterly in visual narrative adaptations of the works of the Western canon. . . . Editor Kick certainly gets it right.”
—Publishers Weekly

“This is not only a survey of the world’s diverse artistic past, but also a breathtaking glimpse of this young medium’s incredible future."
—Booklist (starred review)

"One of the most ambitious [projects] in the history of the graphic medium.... The Graphic Canon continues to be an enrapturing experience... a vibrant, feverish dance through some of the best parts of our artistic history."
—Paste magazine

Acknowledgments

Editor's Introduction

“Kubla Khan”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
art/adaptation by Alice Duke

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
art/adaptation by Hunt Emerson

“Auguries of Innocence”
William Blake
art/adaptation by Aidan Koch

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
William Wordsworth
art/adaptation by PMurphy

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
art/adaptation by Huxley King
design editor: Terrence Boyce

“She Walks in Beauty”
George Gordon, Lord Byron
art/adaptation by David Lasky

“O Solitude”
John Keats
art/adaptation by Hunt Emerson

“Ozymandias”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
art/adaptation by Anthony Ventura

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
adaptation by Jason Cobley
art by Declan Shalvey

Fairy tales
The Brothers Grimm
illustrations by S. Clay Wilson
[“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “The Valiant Little Tailor,” “Hansel and Gretel”]

"How Six Made Good in the World"
The Brothers Grimm
art/adaptation by Shawn Cheng

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
John Keats
art/adaptation by Neil Cohn

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
William Blake
art and lettering by William Blake

The Confessions of Nat Turner
Nat Turner and Thomas R. Gray
art/adaptation by John Pierard

“The Mortal Immortal”
Mary Shelley
art/adaptation by Lance Tooks

Fairy tales
Hans Christian Andersen
illustrations by S. Clay Wilson
[“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Little Match Girl,” “The Nightingale.”]

“Rondeau” (“Jenny Kiss'd Me”)
Leigh Hunt
art/adaptation by Ellen Lindner

Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
art/adaptation by Kevin Dixon

“The Jumblies”
Edward Lear
art/adaptation by Hunt Emerson

Der Struwwelpeter
Heinrich Hoffmann
illustrations and lay-out by Sanya Glisic

Poe spread
illustration by Gris Grimly

“The Raven”
Edgar Allan Poe
art/adaptation by Yien Yip

Works
Edgar Allan Poe
illustrations by Maxon Crumb
[“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Bells,” “The Masque of the Red Death”]

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
art/adaptation by Elizabeth Watasin

Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
art/adaptation by Tim Fish

The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
illustration by Ali J

Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
illustrations by Matt Kish

Walden
Henry David Thoreau
art/adaptation by John Porcellino

Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
art/adaptation by Tara Seibel

Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
art/adaptation by Dave Morice

The Hasheesh Eater
Fitz Hugh Ludlow
art/adaptation by John Pierard

On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
adaptation by Michael Keller
art by Nicolle Rager Fuller

“The Message from Mount Misery”
Frederick Douglass
art/adaptation by Seth Tobocman

Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
art/adaptation by Tara Seibel

“Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Emily Dickinson
art/adaptation by Dame Darcy

“I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed”
Emily Dickinson
art/adaptation by Diana Evans

Letter to George Sand
Gustave Flaubert
art/adaptation by Corinne Mucha

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll
art/adaptation by Dame Darcy

“Jabberwocky”
Lewis Carroll
art/adaptation by Eran Cantrell

Alice gallery
illustrations by various artists [Jasmine Beckett-Griffith, Bill Carman, John Coulthart, Kim Deitch, Andrea Femerstrand, Molly Kiely, Peter Kuper, May Ann Licudine, Olga Lopata, John Ottinger, Christopher Panzner, Natalie Shau, David W. Tripp, Emerson Tung, Raphaëlle Vimont]

Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
art/adaptation by Kako

Venus in Furs
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
art/adaptation by Molly Kiely

"The Drunken Boat"
Arthur Rimbaud
art/adaptation by Julian Peters

Middlemarch
George Eliot
art/adaptation by Megan Kelso

The Hunting of the Snark
Lewis Carroll
art/adaptation by Mahendra Singh

Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
art/adaptation by Ellen Lindner

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
art/adaptation by Ben Moss

Thus Spake Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
adaptation by Laurence Gane
art by Piero

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
adaptation by Danusia Schejbal
art by Andrzej Klimowski

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Ambrose Bierce
art/adaptation by Sandy Jimenez

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
art/adaptation by John Coulthart

Three Panel Reviews
comics strips by Lisa Brown

Further Reading
Jordyn Ostroff

Contributors

Credits and Permissions

Index