By Elizabeth Alsop
I was browsing in a bookstore recently when a copy of Little Women caught my eye. The cover featured crude, inky sketches of the March sisters, arrayed in a quadrant. They seemed to be suffering from a collective bad hair day. "Oh God please!" Meg laments in the thought bubble over her head. "My skin is so bad I want to grow up, and fast!" Next to her, Amy reads from a Bible, sounding like an evangelical Molly Bloom ("Yes Yes God says hey girls be good …") while the sickly Beth frets below ("But I want to be good I'm trying that's what I'm doing all day!"). On the bottom right, tomboyish Jo scoffs at her sisters. "Grow up and then get married?? Forget it I'm not interested ha ha ha hell no!!"
My mother's hardback, this was not. But something about it looked familiar. Flipping to the back flap, I realized why: The cover was drawn by Julie Doucet, a Montreal-based artist much admired in underground comics circles. In college, I was devoted to her now out-of-print comic, Dirty Plotte. But what was she doing with Louisa May Alcott?
Doucet's cover, I learned, was commissioned by Penguin as part of a series called Graphic Classics. In 2005 the publisher began asking well-known cartoonists to redesign selected titles from its catalog. The results, according to Penguin's Web site, are "timeless works of literature featuring amazing, one-of-a-kind cover illustrations from some of today's best graphic artists."
[...]
That we can now appreciate this sort of mash-up of comics and literature may be further proof that we are witnessing the ascendancy of what Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2004, called "the comic book with a brain." Since then, comics have only gained legitimacy; meanwhile literature, we are repeatedly told, is losing it. Graphic novels now regularly appear on college syllabi, and even the Louvre is feting la bande dessinée. In 2007, Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University called "Comics: Marching Into the Canon"—but in fact, they may be walking all over it. And that's probably a good thing. With R. Crumb's cross-hatched version of the Book of Genesis now on shelves, I'm betting that more than a few people will actually read it.
http://chronicle.com/article/Not-Your-Mothers-Literary/48887/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
I was browsing in a bookstore recently when a copy of Little Women caught my eye. The cover featured crude, inky sketches of the March sisters, arrayed in a quadrant. They seemed to be suffering from a collective bad hair day. "Oh God please!" Meg laments in the thought bubble over her head. "My skin is so bad I want to grow up, and fast!" Next to her, Amy reads from a Bible, sounding like an evangelical Molly Bloom ("Yes Yes God says hey girls be good …") while the sickly Beth frets below ("But I want to be good I'm trying that's what I'm doing all day!"). On the bottom right, tomboyish Jo scoffs at her sisters. "Grow up and then get married?? Forget it I'm not interested ha ha ha hell no!!"
My mother's hardback, this was not. But something about it looked familiar. Flipping to the back flap, I realized why: The cover was drawn by Julie Doucet, a Montreal-based artist much admired in underground comics circles. In college, I was devoted to her now out-of-print comic, Dirty Plotte. But what was she doing with Louisa May Alcott?Doucet's cover, I learned, was commissioned by Penguin as part of a series called Graphic Classics. In 2005 the publisher began asking well-known cartoonists to redesign selected titles from its catalog. The results, according to Penguin's Web site, are "timeless works of literature featuring amazing, one-of-a-kind cover illustrations from some of today's best graphic artists."
[...]
That we can now appreciate this sort of mash-up of comics and literature may be further proof that we are witnessing the ascendancy of what Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2004, called "the comic book with a brain." Since then, comics have only gained legitimacy; meanwhile literature, we are repeatedly told, is losing it. Graphic novels now regularly appear on college syllabi, and even the Louvre is feting la bande dessinée. In 2007, Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University called "Comics: Marching Into the Canon"—but in fact, they may be walking all over it. And that's probably a good thing. With R. Crumb's cross-hatched version of the Book of Genesis now on shelves, I'm betting that more than a few people will actually read it.
http://chronicle.com/article/Not-Your-Mothers-Literary/48887/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
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