Detail from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, adapted by Laura Plansker

The Center for Fiction has featured a page from Laura Plansker’s “stunning” interpretation of Animal Farm on their Book Recommendations list, saying of The Graphic Canon:

Here’s Animal Farm as you’ve never seen it. Graphic artist Laura Plansker created this stunning image for The Graphic Canon Volume 3, the third in the widely praised series edited by Russ Kick. In Volume 1, we were treated to Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and The Odyssey…on into the literature of the 1700s. Volume 2 picked withKubla Khan. The final installment takes us from Heart of Darkness to Einstein’s Dreams to Infinite Jest, with more than 70 artists offering arresting new perceptions.

To see Laura Plansker’s page in its entirety on the Center for Fiction’s website, click here!

Detail from James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Calypso,” adapted by Robert Berry

Out of all the spine-tinglingly wonderful adaptations in the third volume of The Graphic Canon, Robert Berry’s is among the most daring. Mr. Berry began his project to adapt James Joyce’s magnum opus, Ulysses, into a graphic form in 2008, and a selection of his work (fourteen pages of the “Calypso” episode from the project, titled Ulysses “Seen”) will be included in Volume 3 this June.

Ulysses is infamously inaccessible, the bane of countless collegiate English majors since its publication over 80 years ago. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most acclaimed books of the 20th century, and its fans and scholars celebrate its legacy each year on Bloomsday (June 16, the date of the novel’s events). Berry and his editor, Mike Barsanti, have embarked on an extraordinary mission to reconcile the novel’s impenetrability with its genius, so as to break down the barriers which prevent so many from enjoying Joyce’s masterpiece. As Barsanti says in this commentary:

Comics offer an almost infinite plasticity of form – and while there are a lot of conventions for certain elements, (like dialog balloons, for instance, which get tricky on a few pages), there are infinite ways to use comic conventions to approximate the narrative innovations of the text. It isn’t the same thing as the text, not by a long shot, and we try to be careful to talk about Ulysses Seen as an adaptation, not a substitute. We hope Ulysses Seen will serve as a bridge to the novel, a way of getting over all of the hype about its difficulty.

Detail from James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Telemachus,” adapted by Robert Berry

This year, Ulysses “Seen” will be featured in four cities around the globe–Dublin, Ireland; Pula, Croatia; Trieste, Italy; and New York City, USA–for an exhibition titled “Four Chapters in Four Cities.” Each city’s exhibit will feature Berry’s original art for the comic and event posters.

Here in New York, the exhibition will be hosted from May 1st through June 30 at the Irish Arts Center, where attendees may view a wealth of pages from the second episode, “Nestor.” There will be a free opening reception and artist’s talk when the exhibition opens on May 1st. A panel discussion moderated by Karen Green will also be held at the IAC on June 4th with Robert Berry and several other illustrious contributors to The Graphic Canon, including Annie Mok, Lauren Weinstein, and Peter Kuper. See you there!

Detail from The Mortal Immortal, adapted by Lance Tooks.

This week’s contributor interview is with the great Lance Tooks, who adapted The Mortal Immortal for The Graphic Canon:

What inspired you to adapt the piece you did for the Graphic Canon?

Russ told me that he was familiar with my work in Eureka’s Graphic Classics series (check out the latest volume, African-American Classics, which I also co-edited!). Mary Shelley’s The Mortal Immortal is a story that’s influenced everyone from Anne Rice to the creators of the Highlander film series, yet is nowhere nearly as famous as her classic Frankenstein. I actually began working on the adaptation before having a publisher in mind, and would still like to eventually expand it into a long-form graphic novel somewhere down the line . . . and Somerset Maugham’s Rain is a nasty little tale that’s been filmed several times, but seemed ripe for a revisit. I was anxious to create my first color story after thirty years as a freelance cartoonist and animator. (I learned a lot!) [Note: Lance's adaptation of Rain will appear in volume 3!]

Detail from The Mortal Immortal, adapted by Lance Tooks.

What other projects are you working on at the moment?

I’m currently creating a brief biography of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay and a piece about jazz and dance for an upcoming comics anthology called The Bohemians, which is being published by Verso. At the same time I’m deep into an original 200 page full-length graphic novel entitled Thug Midwife (sincerest thanks to [Seven Stories Press editor] Veronica for the connection to Seven Stories’ Birth Matters, which is proving a valuable reference!), which tells the story of a young gang member who, upon his release from prison, decides it’s time to stop taking life out of this world and to start bringing it in . . . so he becomes a midwife!

I’m also shopping around an adaptation of Shelley contemporary Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the first vampire story, never before adapted in comics form, which is a shame because it’s a great story. Images from all of these works can be found at my web journal.

Be sure to visit Lance at the 2013 MoCCA Fest, April 6-7th at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City! He’ll be heading back to Spain afterward, so now’s your chance!

Detail from Popul Vuh, adapted by Roberta Gregory

Welcome back to our series of Graphic Canon contributor interviews! This week, we caught up with Popul Vuh adaptor ROBERTA GREGORY:

1) What inspired you to adapt the piece you did for the Graphic Canon?

I was inspired to adapt the Popul Vuh story because I had never heard of the work, but was instantly intrigued by it. My mother’s side of the family is from Mexico and I was happy to work on a story with a Latin American theme, and I have a good friend who has visited Mayan sites and has written a few books on the subject, and I love hearing what she has to say about it. I don’t know if I will ever get to that part of the world myself, but working on this story was like creating a visit to that location, and to that distant era. I was asked not to use the copyright Tedlock version, so I told the story in my own words, trying to keep the spirit of the original, and also adding sometimes-humorous dialogue between the gods. So that would be why people who read another translation would notice different wording in my story. It is a challenge to translate through the ages and over the vast distances!

Detail from Popul Vuh, adapted by Roberta Gregory

2) What other projects are you working on at the moment?

I am currently working on several projects, slowly, because I have a part time ‘day job.’ I am also trying to learn to create web sites, to do digital color, and other techie skills. (The Popul Vuh story was my first major color project, and I can see I still have a lot to learn!) I am collecting people’s true cat stories for a book, True Cat Toons (truecattoons.com) and writing a four-book novel series (Mother Mountain—the first book is ready to be published) and illustrating more travel stories, such as those in my book Follow Your Art, for a future website. And yes, I am trying to work on a Bitchy Bitch graphic novel, since I love this cranky old character so much! Much of this information, and a lot of my other comics, are on my web site, robertagregory.com.

Detail from Apu Ollontay, adapted by Caroline Picard

We continue our series of interviews with those who made The Graphic Canon possible this week, this time with artist Caroline Picard.

1) What inspired you to adapt the piece you did for the Graphic Canon?
I actually contributed two pieces—the first came out in the first GC volume, where I adapted an ancient Incan play, Apu Ollantay. It is the only play known to have survived the Spanish Invasion. I was first taken with the story because I’ve loved Incan works of art for so long and wanted to see how I could potentially incorporate some of those stylistic elements into the comic. As I worked with the story more and more, I began to fall in love with the issues it wrestled with. There are a number of strong female protagonists in the play, at the center of which lies Cosi Cuyllur, the princess, who has decided to go against her father’s wishes and sleep with a husband she chooses for herself. It’s a tragic story for her—she sleeps with her lover and is thereafter exiled to a cave, which causes the country to go to war—but those who banished her are ultimately condemned, just as she is rescued (or unearthed) by the daughter born out of wedlock. While I don’t think her final redemption makes the torment she suffered worthwhile, I think the story tries to capture the wasted lives her father’s will caused. The princess’ body becomes a politicized site, one whose impact and meaning is embodied and carried on via subsequent generations.

Detail from Apu Ollontay, adapted by Caroline Picard

Following a similar thread, I guess (though I didn’t realize it until now), I also adapted a section from Virginia Woolf’s A Voyage Out, where the young protagonist, Rachel, (who has so far spent her entire life on board her father’s ship, reading books and taking naps) has her first kiss with a married man, Mr. Dalloway. Having Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway appear in the book was even more incredible, as I’d met them before in Woolf’s book Mrs. Dalloway. A Voyage Out was Woolf’s first novel and the couple appears in a different light, from a different perspective—that of a young girl. It almost feels like Rachel is a mirror for Woolf’s own perspective and to feel like some of her characters are at the beginning of their fictional lives is kind of incredible. But here too, A Voyage Out is about a young woman’s journey into South America and society (or womanhood), so there seemed to be a really nice thematic resonance with AO. Plus I got to play around a lot with underwater sea creature motifs, as these shadowy, peripheral fears of sexuality (for instance, when Rachel is trying to talk about what happened between her and Mr. Dalloway to another, older friend). What I especially loved was the way Woolf’s characters are kind of blase about the whole thing. The emphasis is on the peculiar feeling of being kissed, not the marital transgression. It’s a great passage and I loved getting the chance to focus so intently on it—my rendition of A Voyage Out is set to come out in volume 3 of the Graphic Canon.

2) What other projects are you working on at the moment?
For the last several years I’ve been working on an ongoing series of comics about Fortuna. Allegedly “the greatest superhero in the world,” she nevertheless suffers from a crippling case of ennui that makes her more or less ineffectual. Her adventures are fairly banal—they involve having secret dinner parties without any guests, making a goldfish sing, tracking down the source of a leak in her ceiling, spending the night on Alcatraz and quitting her job at the Christmas light company. This summer I want to start working on the portion of her story where she rides a horse across the country. The long arc is that eventually she might come into her own. You can see more of that, as well as other comics I’ve made, by going to my website: http://www.cocopicard.com.

Thanks, Caroline! Visit her site for more information on all of Caroline’s projects, and be sure to check out Volume 3 of The Graphic Canon for her adaptation of A Voyage Out!

Detail of Euripedes’ Medea, adapted by Tori McKenna

1) What inspired you to adapt the piece you did for The Graphic Canon?

I had initially done a graphic adaptation of Euripides’ Medea in lieu of a final paper for a Greek Tragedy class in college. It was really nice to revisit the play for this submission. Even though it’s not a happy concept, it’s an extremely visceral play that translates really well to a visual medium. I think comics are an excellent method to present some of the greatest works of classical literature to a public that might not initially be interested in them, and I was overjoyed to be part of this project.

2) What other projects are you working on at the moment?
I’m currently working on a few personal projects, one of which is a graphic novel based on Irish/Scottish folklore. I’d definitely like to revisit some more classical literature in comic form in the future, such as Virgil’s Aeneid.

For more of Tori’s work, follow her on Twitter and Tumblr.

“Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, adapted by Alice Duke

Writing for Paste Magazine, Andy Hughes calls Volume 2 of The Graphic Canon “a vibrant, feverish dance through some of the best parts of our artistic history”:

There’s something seductive about an impossible project … and what would seem more impossible at first glance than The Graphic Canon?

In our age, the very notion of what constitutes “the canon” has been deconstructed and reassembled over and over. The idea of an anthology that encapsulates all of classic literature in visual form seems dubious at best.

So it’s unsurprising that the task falls to someone like Russ Kick, a former editor of books with titles like You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know is Wrong, who seems to have gone from undermining one establishment to giving another one a makeover. The Graphic Canon (subtitled The World’s Greatest Literature as Comics and Visuals) still has one more volume to go, but it already stands as not only Kick’s most ambitious project to date but one of the most ambitious in the history of the graphic medium.

The title is a bit modest, actually. In selecting titles for adaptation, Kick often goes above and beyond the traditional Western body of literature. He includes some works usually left alone even in university classrooms. We saw this in the first volume, which started with Gilgamesh and ended in 18th-century France and included curios like Apu Ollantay, the only surviving work of native Incan drama.

That’s a hard act to follow. For much of Volume 2: From Kubla Khan to the Bronte Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray, we’re stuck with the Victorians and their contemporaries, beginning with a photo-realistic take on Coleridge and skipping through the 19th-century. The famous and familiar abound: See Heathcliff running over the moors! Behold Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde! Witness the Ancient Mariner and Count Vronsky rubbing shoulders with Darwin and Rimbaud.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, adapted by Hunt Emerson

A few lesser-known works get attention, such as Fitz Hugh-Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater, a Mary Shelley B-side and a selection of the infamously macabre nursery rhymes of Der Struwwelpeter. For the most part, though, the thrill this time comes less in the discovery of new things than the anticipation for how such staples as Pride and Prejudice will be represented. True, it may be a bit of a comedown after the first book’s Popol Vuh and Hagoromo. But this also means more focus, with remarkably different views of the same era. We go from the hallucinations of the Romantics to the slave narratives of the American South, from Flaubert to Venus in Furs. Whittling down entries for this one must have been painful; Kick could easily fill three more volumes with adaptations from some of these prolific authors alone.

Thanks, Andy! Check out the full review on Paste to find out which selections from the Canon “transcend”!

Euripides’ Medea, adapted by Tori McKenna

The New York Times’ Annie Weatherwax wrote a wonderful review of volumes 1 and 2 of The Graphic Canon for the Sunday Book Review last month, which we are pleased to reproduce in all its glory below:

There is a synergistic relationship between language and art that is rooted deep within our nature. Great literature leaves us not just with extraordinary stories; the language also leaves an image — a rich and expansive painting of the world written on the page. 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.

We see not only with our eyes, but also, and often more powerfully, with our imaginations. How many of us have pictured Hester Prynne, the blazing scarlet letter A embroidered on her dress? In a portrait by Ali J in Volume 2 of “The Graphic Canon,” Hester Prynne appears as we might imagine her — a simple unadorned woman, the sadness in her eyes tempered by a defiant glint of blue and a slight smile at the corner of her mouth.

“We’re living in a golden age of the graphic novel, of comic art and of illustration in general,” Kick explains in his introduction. “Legions of talented artists — who employ every method, style and approach imaginable — are creating such a flood of amazing, gorgeous, entertaining and groundbreaking material that it’s pretty much impossible to keep up with it all. What if a bunch of these artists used as their source material the greatest literature ever written?”

Much of the literature Kick includes in these two volumes also appears in Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon,” but Kick expands the scope. “Coyote and the Pebbles,” a Native American folk tale; “Popol Vuh,” the creation story of the Maya; and “Apu Ollantay,” apparently the only surviving Incan play, appear in Volume 1. Stories from Asia and the Middle East, science writing, erotica, spiritual and children’s literature also get their due.

“Coyote and the Pebbles,” adapted by Dayton Edmonds and Micah Farritor

Kick has assembled an impressive group of more than 100 artists to illustrate, adapt and visually interpret the text. The list of contributors includes the comic masters Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, Peter Kuper, Molly Crabapple and Roberta Gregory, as well as emerging artists like Yeji Yun, Tara Seibel, Edie Fake and Vicki Nerino.

Each artist offers a unique graphic treatment. Some are rich with visual detail and text; others are more sparsely drawn. Many have little or no text at all. Roughly half are in black and white, while the other half are drawn with a wide ranging palette of color and tone. The adaptations vary in length, but none are more than 30 pages. Some artists adapt selected chapters or individual scenes; others condense their graphic treatment to illustrate the entire literary work. Weighing almost 10 pounds, together these two volumes span 1,000 pages. The amount and density of content at first seem overwhelming, but Kick thoughtfully lays the work out for you.

Arranged chronologically, Volume 1 begins with “The Epic of Gilgamesh”; Volume 2 ends in the late 19th century with Oscar Wilde’s only novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” (“Volume 3: From ‘Heart of Darkness’ to Hemingway to ‘Infinite Jest’ ” will be published in the spring.) Kick’s preface to each piece introduces us to the artist and coaxes us along with enticing tidbits of unusual information about the original text. Every page sends you further down the rabbit hole, and before you know it, hours have passed.

Here you will discover that literature can be hilarious. A case in point is Lisa Brown’s adaptation of “Little Women.” In four deadpan comic drawings, she sums up Alcott’s characters as follows: “Jo: Smart,” “Meg: Sweet,” “Amy: Spoiled,” “Beth: Dead.”

Work that might normally put you to sleep will leave you awe-struck. Most powerful is the seven-page excerpt from William Blake’s “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.” With intricate hand lettering and elaborate gothic drawings, Blake illustrated this book-length poem himself. The rarely seen images included in “The Graphic Canon” are photographs from the only existing color copy of the book.

Volume 1 contains mythological and biblical stories tailor-made for visual treatment. The Book of Revelation, with its array of otherworldly creatures, is adapted by Rick Geary (for years a contributor to National Lampoon) with drawings that explode across the page. In Gareth Hinds’s rendering of the Polyphemus episode, excerpted from his 250-page adaptation of “The Odyssey,” the textured line drawings are awash with vibrant color, each panel a cornucopia of rich detail on which to feast. Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s “Symposium,” in which he explains the mystery of sexual attraction, is illustrated by Yeji Yun. With feverishly etched drawings, she renders his theory that, in the beginning, each human being had four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitalia until Zeus punished everyone by splitting them in half.

Peppered throughout these books is a fair amount of comic bawdiness. Noah Patrick Pfarr reimagines “The Flea” as pulp-fiction lesbian erotica with stylized black-and-white drawings, and Valerie Schrag draws the sex-starved men in “Lysistrata” with huge erections.

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, adapted by Valerie Schrag

Most fascinating are the adaptations of works that less obviously lend themselves to comic or visual treatment. The artist Ryan Dunlavey and the writer Fred Van Lente introduce us to the early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft with energetic oomph in a one-pager from their “Action Philosophers!” comic series. Volume 2 includes an excerpt from John Porcellino’s graphic novel based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau. His Zenlike, understated renderings tread across the page as we might imagine Thoreau once did through Walden Woods. And Megan Kelso’s adaptation of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” captures a breathtaking range of emotion with simple line drawings.

Russ Kick is best known for his “disinformation” guides that expose myths and lies by unearthing subversive facts and countercultural knowledge. His books include “50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know” and “You Are Being Lied To” — volumes that challenge the reader to question assumptions. What he asks us to acknowledge with “The Graphic Canon” is this: “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Leaves of Grass” — these works of literature do not reside just on the shelves of academia; they flourish in the eye of our imagination.

Thanks so much, Annie! For more of Ms. Weatherwax’s writing, art, and sculpture, visit her website here!

The Epic of Gilgamesh, adapted by Kent and Kevin Dixon

In the latest installment of BookRiot’s “Growing Up With…”, Jenn Northington gave the Canon a sterling review:

Ask any teacher or librarian; I’ll bet good money that they’re using graphic novels as teaching tools. While a lot of adults are still feeling their way into the genre, kids and teens seem to accept it as just another way to tell a story. Maybe it’s because picture books aren’t so far in their past? In any case, if ever you wanted to get a tween or teen interested in Gilgamesh, the Popol Vuh, or Candide, this is the book to do it. A survey of literature up through the 1700s, 100+ illustrators have taken the classics and brought them to visual life. When I say that this is a must-have for every bookcase, I really do mean “must-have.”

Thanks, Jenn! Read the full article, “Growing Up With the Classics” on BookRiot and follow @JennIRL on Twitter!