Fables, fairy tales, and other children's literature with all the darkness and weirdness left in
Update: Publishers Weekly gives it a starred review! Read it here.
The Graphic Canon of Children's Literature: The World's Great Kids' Lit as Comics and Visuals
If you think you know what Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy & the Oz crew, Pinocchio, the Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Captain Nemo, Goldilocks, Tom Sawyer, and Peter Pan look like, get ready for a shock. In this follow-up to the initial Graphic Canon trilogy, comics artists and illustrators erase decades and centuries of imagery to bring us radically new visions of over 50 classic works of children's literature. You also get some amazing obscure gems (Leo Tolstoy's tales for children, anyone?), plus a gallery of 60 additional stand-alone images of even more reimagined beloved characters (including Snow White, the Hare and the Tortoise, the Wild Things, Harry Potter, Mary Poppins, and Sam-I-am).
Works & authors include Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, "The Nutcracker," "Little Red Riding Hood," "The Little Mermaid," Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Heidi, Pinocchio, Mark Twain, The Jungle Book, all 14 of the original Oz books, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Pippi Longstocking, Anne Frank, Watership Down, rude schoolyard rhymes, Leo Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde (??), and dozens more
Artists include Andrice Arp, Ricardo Cortés, Dame Darcy, C. Frakes, Rick Geary, Kate Glasheen, Roberta Gregory, Isabel Greenberg, Peter Kuper, Sharon Rudahl, R. Sikoryak, Lance Tooks, Noah Van Sciver, and dozens more
Note: Like children's literature itself, this volume contains many intense images of strangeness, grotesquery, nudity, violence, and danger. There are also moments of beauty and humor, of course. But still... It's actually not aimed at children, so please use caution.
"[The Graphic Canon series] is easily the most ambitious and successfully realized literary project in recent memory, and certainly the one that's most relevant for today's readers." —NPR
Click here for more information about the entire series
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