: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (307), Pride and Prejudice (18), A Modest Proposal (463), The Great Gatsby (286), and Faulkner's The Hill (262).

The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals

The Graphic Canon (3 volumes), contains shortened versions of important literature, sparking the interests of reluctant readers in middle school. Some students don’t like to pick up a complicated novel for their reading requirement, they would much rather skim through a short reading or a comic book. Hopefully graphic canon’s can help to inspire readers to go back to the original novel and read in depth. This creative book collection is filled with amazing pictures and stories that are fascinating to peruse, and get an idea of what is available in the world of literature. These particular graphic canon’s have only been around since 2012, but are fast gaining the interest of English teachers everywhere.

The stories that we are concentrating on this week are:  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (307),

Pride and Prejudice (18), A Modest Proposal (463), The Great Gatsby (286), and Faulkner's The Hill (262).

For over 150 years, artists of all professional levels have offered their own visions of Wonderland. Russ Kick displays his vision through images and many words throughout each page. While reading through this story, it was a little hard to stay on task, since the words are not lined up in an easy-to-read fashion. I had to purposefully pay attention to where I was going next. The images of Alice are wonderful, showing her asleep, upside down, crying and looking up to the heavens. This book is excellent for students who love to read comics.

Pride and Prejudice on page 18 of Volume 2, starts off with a thorough introduction of Jane Austen’s work. This story is easier to follow than Alice’s Adventures that included too many words, and The Great Gatsby, with not enough words. Pride and Prejudice displayed through a comic/diorama style helps the reader become better familiarized with the novel.

Falukner’s The Hill on page 262 of Volume 3 is a colorful creation, complete with nine full page paintings. The whole poem is written out in these nine pages, sometimes the words are together, sometimes they are scattered across the page in different fonts. My favorite depiction is on page 269, it lists 12 mini pictures each captioned with one word: “In-this-way-he-worked-out-the-devastating-unimportance-of-his destiny,” the illustrator gets the reader’s attention by breaking up the words in this way.

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift can be found on page 463 of Volume 1. This is only a two-page read. Very simple, but gets the point across to the reader quickly. “Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the constant breeders gain by the sale of their children. This would be a great inducement to marriage. And it would increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children” (465). Jonathan Swift, the master of satire. “He may have been focusing on Ireland and Britain in the early eighteenth century, but his overall message applies to the U.S. and many other countries in the twenty-first” (463).

"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