In Praise of Classics Illustrated

Cafe Society
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I was brought up on Classics Illustrated.

Those comic books that aspired to present classic literature to kids in the form of fumetti-infested sequential art. The bane of teachers, who thought them even worse than Cliff Notes as a crib for students too lazy to read the original text (my own mother was guilty – she bought me a copy of the CI version of The Iliad and kept borrowing it to catch up on her evening literature class)

But they served as an introduction to us budding readers, giving us the gist of the stories of classic lit and, ideally, providing encouragement for us to actually read the stuff. The comics ran from the 1940s through the early 1970s, and had a brief revival later, not to mention several imitators and competitors (including Marvel comics, in the 1970s and 1980s). But CI stood apart – those comics that kept getting reprinted, later with those expensive painted covers. Not to mentio Classics Illustrated Junior (with fairy tales, for younger kids) and The World Around Us series, and the Special Editions.

What I find interesting, now that I’ve got quite a collection of them, and a CD that has a virtually complete collection of the basic CI comics, is what they chose to include in the collection and, just as telling, what they left out. A lot of the books they include are “classics” only if you stretch your definition. Som of them appear to have been influenced by movies that came out at the time. Some books were obviously chosen because it was thought they would appeal to action-oriented kids, while other, less spectacular works also managed to get included, undoubtedly because they really were classic.

A few of the types, and thoughts on them:

Jules Verne – The CI editions came out during what I think of as the First Jules Verne Renaissance, when they began to be adapted as movies with sound and color, and when the ARCO/Fitzroy editions edited by I.O. Evans came out, trying to pub lish almost every Verne novel in English. The CI editions include:

Around the World in 80 Days

Off on a Comet

From the Earth to the Moon

The Mysterious Island

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Tigers and Traitors

Robur the Conqueror

Master of the World

Michael Strogoff

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

I owned all of these, of course. High impact, with impressive scenes and equally impressive ideas. Early science fiction t its best.

H.G. Wells

Well, if you’re going to have Verne, you need Wells, too, and for the same reasons

The Invisible Man

War of the Worlds

Food of the Gods

First Men in the Moon

The Time Machine

Edgar Allen Poe

Not as many as the others, and they tended to cease production early on

Poe’s Mysteries

The Gold Bug and other stories

The revived Classics Illustrated added The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher

Washington Irving

Rip van Winkle

The revived edition gave us Th Legend of Sleepy Hollow

William Shakespeare

You can’t do classics without Shakespeare

Julius Caesar

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Romeo and Juliet

Macbeth

Hamlet

I’m surprised they didn’t dio more

Frank Buck

A big-game hunter, famous in the 1930s and 1940s. Literature it ain’t, but I could see why they couldn’t resist telling his jungle stories

Bring 'em Back Alive

Fang and Claw

On Jungle TRails

Nordhoff and Hall

They did the entire Bounty trilogy, by gum. I’m sure they were influenced by the release of the two movie versions

Mutiny on the Bounty

Pitcairn’s Island

Men Against the Sea

Talbot Mundy

Again, this is an adventure novel, not a classic. I’m convinced they brought it out because a movie version was coming out

King – of the Khyber Rifles

Robert Louis Stevenson

You can’t ignore Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Although I notice that the first edition deviates from Stevenson’s story.

Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde

Treasure Island

Kidnapped

The Bottle Imp

The Black Arrow

James Fenimore Cooper

It’s as if they wanted to be sure they got all the Natty Bumppo tales in comic book form

The Pioneers

The Last of the Mohicans

The Prairie

The Pathfinder

The Deerslayer

The Spy

The Red Rover

The Pilot

Charles Dickens

DEFINITELY classics. This was my introduction to Great Expectations, one of the CI titles that disappeared early on.

A Tale of Two Cities

David Copperfield

Great Expectations

A Christmas Carol

Oliver Twist

Alexandre Dumas

Swashbuckling action and classic lit – the perfect CI formula. Except it didn’t hook me

The Three Musketeers

The Count of Monte Christo

Twenty Years After

The Man in the Iron Mask

The Black Tulip

The 45 Guardsmen

and plenty of others.

What’s interesting to me are the classics that were NOT adapted:

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Beowulf

The Song of Roland

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight

El Cid

The Argonautica (The Journey of the Argo)

The Aeneid

I could understand shying away from the adult content in The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron, but there were other stories they could tell. Heck, they did an adaptation of The Arabian Nights, although that became one of the harder issues to find later on – it wasn’t even listed on the back cover. Also too bad – there were a LOT of Arabian Nighs stories they could have done.

CI tended to stay away from religion, but they put out a Special Edition on The Ten Commandments that, suspiciously, came out about the same time as Cecil B. deMille’s movie. They also came out with a special edition of The Story of Jesus.

So they could’ve done adaptations of various stories from the Bible. I doubt if they’d have been interested, but they could’ve done the Mahabharata

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I read a ton of these when I was a kid. You could buy used ones for half the cover price at used book stores in the 1970s. And, yes. English teachers fell for it every time I took that shortcut.

One thing I will note is that CI made very little attempt to appeal to young female readers. Even the adaptations of female writers (Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin) weren’t selected to appeal to that audience. Classics Illustrated was the worst offender in that regard in a field (comic books) with an extremely low bar to start with.

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There’s been a more modern “reboot”, GRAPHIC CLASSICS, with shorter versions of stories, grouped by author or subject. An artist/editor gets his favorite artists, many from the world of underground comix, to illustrate. Some, like Rick Geary, make the classics come alive.

The most popular volumes have been Poe, Lovecraft, Sci-Fi Classics, and African-American Classics. Worth checking out.

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Found an old interview with the editor.

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I have a stack of Classics Illustrated in basement storage (from my father’s work buddy). I should read, sell, or otherwise do something with them one of these days.

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What if a book report is required to get into a good retirement home?

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I inherited these:

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When I was a kid (circa 1980), we had a couple of old Classics Illustrated comics from the early '60s. I believe they were “The Cossack Chief” (Taras Bulba, by Nikolai Gogol) and “The Black Arrow” (mentioned in the OP). I thought they were pretty lame at the time, but I’d probably appreciate them more nowadays.

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The Tripod machines in the CI War of the Worlds beat anything I’ve seen anywhere else.

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Beat me to it. Yes, reading through the thread, I was reminded of two of my CI favourites: The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Both by H.G. Wells. And those tripods were something else.

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I was just going to mention this one. I went with my dad to see the movie with Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis at Christmas 1962. When I read the CI version of the novel much later, I was surprised to see it ended very differently from the film.

Summary

The eponymous character is burned at the stake after executing his traitorous son and being captured by the Poles.

I also learned that a certain contemporary slur originally meant nothing other than bundles of firewood. (Wait, they’re piling what under him?!? :open_mouth: )

I’m slightly embarrassed by never having read the novel, even though I have an MA in Russian. I have however, thoroughly enjoyed other stories by Gogol, who seems to have had a few screws loose. I particularly liked The Inspector General (the Soviet version of that work’s film is much better than Danny Kaye’s) and The Nose, about which I wrote when I was in grad school.

Summary

I think the protagonist wakes up one morning to find his penis is gone, not his nose.

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Agreed. I remember having both of those with me when I was six or seven and sharing a hotel room with my dad. They freaked me out so much that I couldn’t get to sleep and spent all night in bed with the lights turned on.

Whenever I draw a Martian fighting machine (which I do on occasion), it always looks like the ones in the CI comic.

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and wasn’t the word “fag” originally a British slang reference to a cigarette?

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I had five or six of the ones listed in the OP, plus a few others including The Moonstone and Les Miserables. In 2012 my daughter read Les Mis – the complete don’t-drop-it-on-your-toes novel (twice, I think). Someone was doing small-format reprints of CI, and I managed to find a copy of Les Mis to give her.

The picture I remember best was the one of HMS Thunderchild coming up to attack the tripods.