The Graphic Canon: The World's Great Literature as Comics and Visuals

Volume 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest

The Graphic Canon series presents the world's classic literature—from ancient times to the late twentieth century—as eye-popping comics, illustrations, and other visual forms. The final volume of the initial trilogy begins at the turn of the 20th century, takes in modernism, the Beats, the Harlem Renaissance, postmodernism, and lots of unexpected twists and turns (including hardboiled detective fiction, New Wave sci-fi, Existentialism, the Soviets, mystical visions, and theoretical physics) before ending in the late 1990s.

Works & authors include H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, The Age of Innocence, W.B. Yeats, William Faulkner, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, Franz Kafka, The Great Gatsby, Black Elk, 1984 and Animal Farm, Sartre and Camus, The Grapes of Wrath, Vladimir Nabokov, Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Anaïs Nin, The Master and Margarita, Kathy Acker, Blood Meridian, & dozens more

Artists include Robert Crumb, Dame Darcy, Ted Rall, Peter Kuper, Molly Crabapple, R. Sikoryak, Milton Knight, Zak Smith, Matt Kish, Rebecca Migdal, C. Frakes, Robert Berry, David Lasky, Andrice Arp, Yeji Yun, & dozens more

"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)

"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

“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)

"The Graphic Canon is an astounding literary and art project, instigated by legendary crusading editor, publisher, anthologist and modern Renaissance Man Russ Kick, which endeavours to interpret the world’s great books through the eyes of masters of crusading sequential narrative in an eye-opening synthesis of modes and styles."—Win Wiacek, Now Read This! / comicsreview.co.uk

“These three volumes are genuinely things of beauty—lush, gorgeous, dazzling visual recreations of the literary works we (at least of a certain generation) devoured.”
—Counterpunch

"Holy shit, people."
—Austin Chronicle

Editor's Introduction

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
illustrations by Matt Kish

The Awakening
Kate Chopin
art/adaptation by Rebecca Migdal

The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
art/adaptation by Tara Seibel

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
photo-dioramas by Graham Rawle

"The New Accelerator"
H.G. Wells
art/adaptation by Cole Johnson

“Reginald”
Saki
art/adaptation by Sonia Leong

Mother
Maxim Gorky
art/adaptation by Stephanie McMillan

“If—”
Rudyard Kipling
art/adaptation by Frank Hansen

John Barelycorn
Jack London
art/adaptation by John Pierard

“Araby” (from Dubliners)
James Joyce
art/adaptation by Ed Choy

“The Metamorphosis”
Franz Kafka
art/adaptation by R. Sikoryak

The Voyage Out
Virginia Woolf
art/adaptation by Caroline Picard

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T.S. Eliot
art/adaptation by Anthony Ventura

“The Mowers”
D.H. Lawrence
art/adaptation by Bishakh Som

“Sea Iris”
H.D.
art/adaptation by Bishakh Som

“A Matter of Colour”
Ernest Hemingway
art/adaptation by Dan Duncan

The Madman
Kahlil Gibran
art/adaptation by Matt Wiegle

“Hands” (from Winesburg, Ohio)
Sherwood Anderson
art/adaptation by Ted Rall

“The Dreaming of the Bones”
W.B. Yeats
art/adaptation by Lauren Weinstein

Chéri
Colette
illustration by Molly Crabapple

The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
art/adaptation by Colleen Frakes

"Dulce et Decorum Est"
Wilfred Owen
adaptation: Jason Cobley
line work: John Blake
coloring: Michael Reid
lettering: Greg Powell

“The Second Coming”
W. B. Yeats
art/adaptation by Anthony Ventura

“The Penitent” and “The Singing-Woman from the Wood's Edge”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
art/adaptation by Joy Kolitsky

“The Top” and “Give It Up!”
Franz Kafka
art/adaptation by Peter Kuper

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Langston Hughes
art/adaptation by Jenny Tondera

“Rain”
W. Somerset Maugham
art/adaptation by Lance Tooks

Ulysses
James Joyce
art/adaptation by Robert Berry

Ulysses
James Joyce
art/adaptation by David Lasky

“Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris”
Ernest Hemingway
art/adaptation by Steve Rolston

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
Wallace Stevens
art/adaptation by Anthony Ventura

"The Hill"
William Faulkner
art/adaptation by Kate Glasheen

Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
art/adaptation by J. Ben Moss

"The Waste Land"
T.S. Eliot
art/adaptation by Chandra Free

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
illustrations by Tara Seibel

Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse
illustrations by John Pierard

Lady Chatterley's Lover
D.H. Lawrence
art/adaptation by Lisa Brown

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
art/adaptation by Robert Goodin

Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
lay-out and design by James Uhler

The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
art/adaptation by T. Edward Bak

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
illustration by Carly Schmitt

“Poker!”
Zora Neal Hurston
art/adaptation by Milton Knight

Black Elk Speaks
Black Elk and John G. Neihardt
illustrations by Molly Kiely

"Strange Fruit" (a.k.a “Bitter Fruit”)
Lewis Allan
art/adaptation by John Roberson

Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
art/adaptation by Robert Crumb

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
art/adaptation by Liesbeth De Stercke

Three stories
Jorge Luis Borges
illustrations by Kathryn Siveyer

The Stranger
Albert Camus
adaptation: Juan Carlos Kreimer
art: Julián Aron

Animal Farm
George Orwell
photo-dioramas by Laura Plansker

“The Heart of the Park”
Flannery O'Connor
art/adaptation by Jeremy Eaton

Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
illustration by Lesley Barnes

The Man With the Golden Arm
Nelson Algren
art/adaptation by Jeremy Eaton

"The Voice of the Hamster"
Thomas Pynchon
art/adaptation by Brendan Leach

Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
illustration by Gustavo Rinaldi

“The Dancer”
Gabriela Mistral
illustration by Andrea Arroyo

Lord of the Flies
William Golding
art/adaptation by Trevor Alixopulos

The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley
illustrations by John Pierard

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
art/adaptation by Sally Madden

Four Beats
art and design by Tara Seibel

On the Road
Jack Kerouac
illustration by Yeji Yun

Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs
art/adaptation by Emelie Östergren

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
art/adaptation by PMurphy

The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
illustration by Ellen Lindner

Last Exit to Brooklyn
Hubert Selby, Jr.
art/adaptation by Juliacks

Diaries
Anaïs Nin
art/adaptation by Mardou

The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
art/adaptation by Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
illustrations by Yien Yip

In Watermelon Sugar
Richard Brautigan
illustration by Juliacks

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
illustrations by Zak Smith

Crash
J.G. Ballard
art/adaptation by Onsmith

“I Bought a Little City”
Donald Barthelme
illustration by Andrice Arp

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
Raymond Carver
illustrations by Ed Choy

Blood and Guts in High School
Kathy Acker
art/adaptation by Molly Kiely

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
illustrations by Dame Darcy

Foucault’s Pendulum
Umberto Eco
art/adaptation by Julia Gfrörer

Wild at Heart
Barry Gifford
art/adaptation by Rick Trembles

The Famished Road
Ben Okri
art/adaptation by Aidan Koch

Einstein's Dreams
Alan Lightman
art/adaptation by Rey Ortega

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
illustration by Rey Ortega

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
illustrations by Benjamin Birdie

Three Panel Reviews
comic strips by Lisa Brown

Further Reading
Jordyn Ostroff

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Credits and Permissions

Index