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A review by mattycakesbooks
The Graphic Canon, Volume 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest by Russ Kick
3.0
Unfortunately, I thought this series got progressively worse. The first had a lot of full stories - the Arabian Nights, the Native American "How the Coyote got his..." stories, the great Greek and Roman myths - and that made for more entertaining reading. As the series went on, the illustrations became more abstract, and they reflected less of the stories I actually like.
I know it's pointless in a collection to say, "Why didn't you choose THIS?" because ultimately, it's impossible to satisfy everyone, but I was supremely annoyed to see someone like Richard Brautigan - who wrote my least favorite book ever ("Trout Fishing in America,")- getting a spot, while Joseph Heller, Hunter Thompson, and Kurt Vonnegut all failed to make an appearance.
That's the curse of any collection though. It was an awesome project, and I'm glad someone did it, but I hope - I'm sure it won't - stop there. Adapting literature in graphic form is a fantastic idea, and, like literature, some of it's going to leave me cold, and some of it's going to excite me. Kick, I thought, tended to lean towards the more Harold Bloom camp, which is probably the more "serious" literature, and I can't deny that most of what he picked would be agreed upon by most academics. I hate Harold Bloom's taste though. Give me Stephen King over Ulysses any day. I don't care if that makes me a philistine.
It was a good series, and it's not up to Kick to pick my favorites.
I know it's pointless in a collection to say, "Why didn't you choose THIS?" because ultimately, it's impossible to satisfy everyone, but I was supremely annoyed to see someone like Richard Brautigan - who wrote my least favorite book ever ("Trout Fishing in America,")- getting a spot, while Joseph Heller, Hunter Thompson, and Kurt Vonnegut all failed to make an appearance.
That's the curse of any collection though. It was an awesome project, and I'm glad someone did it, but I hope - I'm sure it won't - stop there. Adapting literature in graphic form is a fantastic idea, and, like literature, some of it's going to leave me cold, and some of it's going to excite me. Kick, I thought, tended to lean towards the more Harold Bloom camp, which is probably the more "serious" literature, and I can't deny that most of what he picked would be agreed upon by most academics. I hate Harold Bloom's taste though. Give me Stephen King over Ulysses any day. I don't care if that makes me a philistine.
It was a good series, and it's not up to Kick to pick my favorites.