The Graphic Canon: The World's Great Literature as Comics and Visuals (Seven Stories Press) is a three-volume anthology, edited by Russ Kick, that renders some of the world's greatest and most famous literature into graphic-novel form. The first two volumes were released in 2012, and the concluding volume was published in spring 2013.
NPR declared: "It's easily the most ambitious and successfully realized literary project in recent memory, and certainly the one that's most relevant for today's readers." In a full-page review, The New York Times Sunday Book Review concluded: "What [editor Russ Kick] 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.” The following week, it was named an "Editors' Choice" in the NY Times Sunday Book Review.
Publishers Weekly called it "a must-have anthology," Library Journal said it's "an exciting new benchmark for comics," Booklist dubbed it "a uniquely powerful piece of art," and School Library Journal declared it "startlingly brilliant" and "a masterpiece of literary choices as well as art and interpretation."
Volume 1: From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons, published May 2012, features 55 classic works of literature, going from the earliest, ancient literature until the end of the 1700s. Some of the artists include Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, Molly Crabapple, Rick Geary, and Seymour Chwast.
The Epic of Gilgamesh"Coyote and the Pebbles"The Iliad and The Odyssey by HomerPoem Fragments from SapphoMedea by EuripidesLysistrata by AristophanesPlato's SymposiumThe Book of EstherTao Te Ching by Lao TzuMahabharata by VyasaThe Analects and Other Writings by ConfuciusThe Book of DanielOn the Nature of Things by LucretiusAeneid by VirgilThe Book of RevelationThree Tang Poems: "Frontier Song" by Wang Han, "A Village South of the Capital" by Cui Hu, and "Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon" by Li BaiBeowulfThe Tale of Genji by Murasaki ShikibuThe Letters of Heloise and Abelard"O Nobilissima Viriditas" by Hildegard of Bingen"The Fisherman and the Genie" and "The Woman with Two Coyntes" from The Arabian NightsPoems from RumiThe Divine Comedy and The Inferno by Dante AlighieriThe Tibetan Book of the Dead by Padmasambhava and Karma LingpaThe Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer"The Last Ballad" by François VillonLe Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas MaloryApu OllantayHagoromoOutlaws of the Water Margin by Shi Nai'anPopol VuhThe Visions of St. Teresa of Avila"Hot Sun, Cool Fire" by George PeeleJourney to the West by Wu Cheng'enThe Faerie Queene by Edmund SpenserA Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Hamlet, "Sonnet 18", and "Sonnet 20" by William ShakespeareDon Quixote by Miguel Cervantes"The Flea" by John Donne"To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew MarvellParadise Lost by John Milton"Forgive Us Our Trespasses" by Aphra BehnGulliver's Travels and "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift"Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress" and "Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels" (A.K.A. "Fart Proudly") by Benjamin FranklinCandide by VoltaireLondon Journal by James BoswellA Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary WollstonecraftDangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de LaclosVolume 2: From "Kubla Khan" to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray, published October 2012, continues chronologically by featuring 51 of the great, classic works of the 19th century. A few of the artists include Maxon Crumb, Gris Grimly, Hunt Emerson, John Porcellino, John Coulthart, Dame Darcy, S. Clay Wilson, and Seth Tobocman.
Moby-Dick by Herman MelvilleAdventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner""Auguries of Innocence" and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion by William Blake"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth"She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron"O Solitude" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats"Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley"Snow White and the Seven Dwarves", "The Valiant Little Tailor", "Hansel and Gretel", and "How Six Made Good in the World" by the Brothers GrimmThus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich NietzscheOn the Origin of Species by Charles DarwinFrankenstein and "The Mortal Immortal" by Mary ShelleyLes Misérables by Victor HugoThe Confessions of Nat Turner by Nat Turner and Thomas Ruffin Gray"The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Match Girl", "The Nightingale" by Hans Christian Andersen"Jenny Kiss'd Me" by Leigh Hunt"The Jumblies" by Edward Lear"The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Raven", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "the Bells", and "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan PoeJane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëWuthering Heights by Emily BrontëThe Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne"The Message from Mount Misery" by Frederick Douglass"Because I could not stop for Death" and "I taste a liquor never brewed" by Emily Dickinson"Letter to George Sand" by Gustave FlaubertMiddlemarch by George EliotAnna Karenina by Leo TolstoyCrime and Punishment by Fyodor DostoevskyWalden by Henry David Thoreau"Le Bateau ivre" by Arthur RimbaudLeaves of Grass by Walt WhitmanThe Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar WildePride and Prejudice by Jane AustenAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis CarrollVenus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-MasochThe Hasheesh Eater by Fitz Hugh LudlowDer Struwwelpeter by Heinrich HoffmannOliver Twist by Charles DickensStrange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson"Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce"The Picture of Dorian Gray" a 10-page collage adaptation by John CoulthartVolume 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest (March 2013) begins with three great works from 1899 and continues with 77 works from the twentieth century, ending in 1996. Featured artists include Robert Crumb, Dame Darcy, Ted Rall, Milton Knight, and Tara Seibel, among many others.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph ConradNaked Lunch by William S. BurroughsLetters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria RilkeThe Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot"The Second Coming" by W. B. YeatsThe Voyage Out by Virginia WoolfUlysses and "Araby" from Dubliners by James JoyceLolita by Vladimir NabokovThe Age of Innocence by Edith WhartonSiddhartha and Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston HughesOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken KeseyLast Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr.Crash by J. G. BallardAnimal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George OrwellThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank BaumBrave New World and The Doors of Perception by Aldous HuxleyWaiting for Godot by Samuel BeckettOne Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García MárquezThe Bell Jar by Sylvia PlathOn the Road by Jack KerouacThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki MurakamiNausea by Jean-Paul SartreBlood Meridian by Cormac McCarthyThe Great Gatsby by F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Awakening by Kate ChopinThe Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund FreudThe New Accelerator by H. G. Wells"Reginald" by Saki"Mother" by Maxim Gorky"If—" by Rudyard Kipling"John Barleycorn" by Jack London"The Metamorphosis", "The Top", and "Give It Up!" by Franz Kafka"The Mowers" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D. H. Lawrence"Sea Iris" by H.D."A Matter of Colour" and "Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris" by Ernest Hemingway"The Madman" by Kahlil Gibran"Hands" from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson"The Dreaming of Bones" by W. B. Yeats"Cheri' by Colette"Dulce et Decorum est" by Wilfred Owen"The Sound and the Fury" and "The Hill by William Faulkner"The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett"Poker!" by Zora Neale Hurston"Black Elk Speaks" by Black Elk and John G. Neihardt"Strange Fruit" by Lewis Allan"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck"The Pertinent" and "The Singing-Woman from the Wood's Edge" by Edna St. Vincent Millay"Rain" by W. Somerset Maugham"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens"Three stories" by Jorge Luis Borges"The Stranger" by Albert Camus"The Heart of the Park" by Flannery O'Connor"The Voice of the Hamster" and "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon"The Dancer" by Gabriela Mistral"Lord of the Flies" by William Golding"Diaries" by Anaïs Nin"Four Beats""The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov"In Watermelon Sugar" by Richard Brautigan"I Bought a Little City" by Donald Barthelme"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver"Blood and Guts in High School" by Kathy Acker"Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco"Wild at Heart" by Barry Gifford"The Famished Road" by Ben Okri"Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace
