What classics do you like as graphic novels?

I was in a bookstore the other day and I happened to see a delightful collection of books: Manga Shakespeare! Link: http://www.mangashakespeare.com/

I almost spent all of my money right then and there. I figure, I love literature, I love illustration…let’s combine them! I particularly want the Richard III. I think the only thing that stopped me was the idea that the weight charge on my suitcase is something I want to avoid. And yes, some of them move the setting to space, or the future, but the thing is, I don’t really mind. If that makes me a bad lit student, so be it.

I also have found graphic novel versions of Beowulf and Fahrenheit 451, which I will be getting my hands on as soon as is feasible.

I have read a collection of Poe’s stories illustrated by Gris Grimly, that was awesome.

So what are your favorite classics in graphic novel form? Heavily illustrated versions can play too.

Or, what classics would you like to see in graphic novel form?

Personally, I would like to see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a graphic novel, really well done, and not as a way of making the work for children. Like, if I knew an artist and had a boat full of money, I would commission it.

Ooh! Also Frankenstein. Wuthering Heights. The Sherlock Holmes canon. GREEK MYTHS OMG. The Great Gatsby. Gulliver’s Travels.

I mean, I love reading, but it is just wonderful to see what talented people can do to bring the visuals of a story into the concrete world and out of the imagination.

Oh, and this is the website that got me thinking about this topic: http://heyoscarwilde.com/ It’s a collection of artwork based on literary characters and authors. There’s one done by Bruce Timm of Gully Foyle from The Stars My Destination, which basically checks all my happy geek boxes.

Well, by the time I was 7 or so, I had read many of the greatest work in the Western literary canon in “Classics Illustrated” form. I know, those were not so much modern “graphic novels” as a lazy high schooler’s way to avoid reading novels.

Still, I have to say, I wish James Fenimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans” was half as enjoyable as the “Classics Illustrated” comic version. I got a great adventure yarn without Cooper’s godawful prose.

Caldwell’s *Dracula. *

Cartoon Shakespeare: Twelfth Night.

Both very, very good!

Oh, I like the look of that one! I think the main advantage of a graphic novel Dracula is that they can probably avoid the slump before the end where we get to read about shipping schedules and such, I don’t really remember because I just wanted to get to the staking…:stuck_out_tongue:

The Hobbit

Gilgamesh the King

Perch, then Mink

in elementary school I remember reading a really great graphic novel version of Frankenstein. Kind of cartoony.

Not really a graphic novel, but there’s a version of Frankenstein that’s illustrated very heavily by Bernie Wrightson.

Bernie Wrightson is a fucking genius.

The Scarlet Letter was WAY better as Classics Illustrated. The people who did the comic book remembered that there’s a great exciting story buried in there.

The Red Badge of Courage was another book well served by the Classics Illustrated treatment.

Moby Dick, illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz. It was my first exposure to Sienkiewicz’s work. I’m not that big a comic book fan, but I love all of his stuff.

The comic was much more fun… but of course, Stephen Crane probably would have told us, “The boring stretches of the book are SUPPOSED to be dull, you dimwits! The whole point is how much tedium, how much sitting around doing nothing there is during wartime. At any given moment during a war, a soldier is either scared to death or bored to death.”

Those of us who read the “Classics Illustrated” version, of course, didn’t get any of the sense of boredom that Henry Fleming faced in the book.

My very first exposure to fantasy writing was the graphic novel version of The Hobbit. I re-read it many times and it wasn’t until years later I found out that a significant amount of the story was cut from the original book to make it. Still, it’s quite enjoyable. I still giggle whenever I think about the troll picking his nose.

The Roy Thomas version of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung seriously needs to come back into print.

Also, Marvel Comics started a series of DRACULA that was picked back up & completed in four issues a few years back.

Which also was written by Roy Thomas! L

Just a note to say that I ordered Hamlet and R&J manga shakespeare. I think my kids may dig them as well as me.

Although I was a big fan of the old Classics Illustrated, I don’t think they’re really impressive as graphic novels. Some are well done, but an awful lot of others have very poor graphics, and some are downright awful. They’re good as introductions to literature, but they aren’t compelling storytelling. and I include the two later revivals of CI. the Marvel Classics series was more dramatic, but I still wasn’t impressed.
Nor was I taken by the more recent adaptations of The Iliad and The Odyssey (I missed The Ring series)
Overall the best adaptations of literary works to graphic novel I’ve seen have been the old Marvel Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction adaptations – Theodore Sturgeon’s “It”, Harry Bates’ “Farewell to the Master”, Fredric Brown’s “Arena”. But that’s not “classics” by the usual definition.

I find Genesis considerably more entertaining in the R. Crumb version.

See the last hours of Sodom!

Personally, if we’re talking Sodom I like the Jack Chick version, myself. As I recall, there’s a frame of a Chick tract where one of the Sodomites is so evil he has grown a third eye.

I really love The Hobbit. I don’t know why they never followed that up with LOTR.

The adaptation is well-written, too. Which is harder than yopu’d think.

Got that, & I agree.