The Graphic Canon, Vol. 2: From Kubla Khan to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Graphic Canon, Volume 2  gives us a visual cornucopia based on the wealth of literature from the 1800s. Several artists—including Maxon Crumb and Gris Grimly—present their versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s visions. The great American novel  Huckleberry Finn  is adapted uncensored for the first time, as Twain wrote it. The bad boys of Romanticism—Shelley, Keats, and Byron—are visualized here, and so are the Brontë sisters. We see both of Coleridge’s most famous “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the latter by British comics legend Hunt Emerson). Philosophy and science are ably represented by ink versions of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra  and Darwin’s  On the Origin of Species . Frankenstein ,  Moby-Dick ,  Les Misérables ,  Great Expectations ,  Middlemarch ,  Anna Karenina ,  Crime and Punishment  (a hallucinatory take on the pivotal murder scene), Thoreau’s  Walden  (in spare line art by John Porcellino of King-Cat Comics fame), “The Drunken Boat” by Rimbaud,  Leaves of Grass  by Whitman, and two of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems are all present and accounted for. John Coulthart has created ten magnificent full-page collages that tell the story of  The Picture of Dorian Gray  by Oscar Wilde. And  Pride and Prejudice  has never looked this splendiferous! This volume is a special treat for Lewis Carroll fans. Dame Darcy puts her unmistakable stamp on—what else?—the Alice books in a new 16-page tour-de-force, while a dozen other artists present their versions of the most famous characters and moments from Wonderland. There’s also a gorgeous silhouetted telling of “Jabberwocky,” and Mahendra’s Singh’s surrealistic take on “The Hunting of the Snark.” Curveballs in this volume include fairy tales illustrated by the untameable S. Clay Wilson, a fiery speech from freed slave Frederick Douglass (rendered in stark black and white by Seth Tobocman), a letter on reincarnation from Flaubert, the Victorian erotic classic  Venus in Furs , the drug classic  The Hasheesh Eater , and silk-screened illustrations for the ghastly children’s classic  Der Struwwelpeter . Among many other canonical works.