Comic Classics

There has been a long tradition of comic versions of classic literature: the Classics Illustrated series began in 1941, and ran for 30 years, for example. I have read very few such adaptations, but have nothing against them in principle: a comic version is like a film version--almost certain to be inferior, but with the potential to do some things visually in a way that text on a page cannot. Because of this, I was interested to come across the publications of Selfmadehero, a company dedicated to comic adaptations of classic fiction, crime fiction, and Shakespeare (see below).

I'm posting the covers of their classic adaptations here because it's interesting to see these visual approaches to great works.

I have to say that I'm tempted to see what Andrzej Klimowski makes of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Martin Rowson seems a natural fit for Tristram Shandy. I do have an older graphic novel by Rowson, who is most famous as an incredibly savage political cartoonist: it's a weird book that recasts T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a detective story.

Among other books, he's also done a cartoon history of the universe, entitled Fuck: The Human Odyssey.

Selfmadehero's Shakespeares, by the way, are all done in manga style:

Faber & Faber & Faber & Faber...

My most recent purchase of book porn is Faber and Faber: Eighty Years of Book Cover Design (which I first mentioned here).



This is a lovely, oversized (roughly A4) collection of images of Faber's covers from 1929 onwards. The text is minimal, but there are hundreds and hundreds of pretty pictures to look at. Excuse the photographs (which you can click for much bigger views), but there was no way I was killing this thing's spine with my scanner.





The book itself had its cover designed by Neil Gower, mimicking the classic work of Berthold Wolpe, who did pretty much all of Faber's covers for some 35 years (as well as designing Albertus, the font used on this and many other earlier Faber covers).







Faber, at least in its earlier decades, did not have the range of cover art of, say, Penguin, due in part to having one designer with a consistent vision, but there are plenty of gems here.

My only criticism is that Connolly seems to lose interest after about 1980, and there are hardly any covers from the last 30 years shown here. This means that there are few of Pentagram's covers, and, weirdly, absolutely none by Andrzej Klimowski. It was Klimowski's covers for the work of Milan Kundera that first caught my eye and drew my attention to Faber back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when I was a young lad for whom the combination of literature and naked women was pretty much irresistable.



(For Klimowski doing Wodehouse, see here.)

Wodehouse Old & New

Searching for a particular P. G. Wodehouse quote, I came across the Random Wodehouse Quote Generator, and wasted some happy time laughing. (The quote I was after was from Bertie Wooster in Right Ho, Jeeves. As he attempts to storm out of a room, he turns to have the last word: '“Tinkerty tonk,” I said, and I meant it to sting.')

Anyway, this inevitably got me onto hunting down various Wodehouse covers. For several decades in the UK, almost every Wodehouse title has been published by Penguin, but late last year Random House took over the rights and has started pumping out the books under their Arrow imprint. In the US, Vintage and Everyman print the paperbacks and hardbacks respectively.

The most recent Penguin covers and the new Arrow covers are quite similar in spirit but different in execution, so I thought it would be interesting to look at them both, and compare them with other Wodehouse covers from the past. I'm only doing this for a couple of titles, as an attempt to round up all of the various covers for a writer who produced more than 90 books would kill me.

The first is Code of the Woosters, one of the classic Jeeves and Wooster books.

Here we have the Penguin version, with a cover illustration by the excellent David Hitch, who did all of the covers for this edition of the Wodehouse books.


This is the new Arrow version, cover artist as yet unkown to me--an Arrow art director simply says that they're "a fantastic Korean artist" in an interview. (UPDATE: A helpful commenter lets me know that the artist is Swan Park.)


Then we have the Vintage US edition, with an illustration from Marc Rosenthal, illustrator, children's-book and comics artist.


And this is the Everyman hardback, with a cover by Polish artist Andrzej Klimowski, who has similarly illustrated all the books in this edition of Wodehouse.


Then we have the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic and Modern Classic editions, both using a detail from a lovely 1927 poster by Alfred Leele, 'The Lure of the Underground'.



And here's the (unfortunately low-resolution) poster.


Some other Code of the Woosters now. An American 1950s Ace edition:


Another Penguin from 1971:


A Folio Society edition from 1999:


An indeterminate edition from 1975:


And a Vintage edition from 1990:


Now we'll look at a different Wodehouse--Uncle Fred in the Springtime, one of the excellent Castle Blandings books. Again, we'll kick off with the David Hitch Penguin and the unknown new Arrow editions.



And here is the Klimowski 2004 Everyman edition:


Here we have earlier Penguins, from 1954, 1961 and 1979 respectively (cover artists unknown for the last two).




A Candian 1939 edition from McClelland & Stewart:


A Hutchinson hardback from 1987:


A Simon & Schuster US version from 1969:


And finally a Folio Society edition from 2004, with its slipcase.


UPDATE: The deeply wise Alan Trotter points out that "the old Penguin Code of the Woosters you show was done by Ionicus, who did all the Penguin Wodehouses for years: obituaries here and here. As far as I'm concerned, having grown up with his work, Ionicus is the only proper Wodehouse illustrator, though I like Klimowski too; most of the others are too cartoonish. Can I warn anybody tempted by the Modern Classics cover that this edition was appallingly proofread, to the extent that a number of jokes were spoiled or lost."