If you’re like me, you probably have a whole list of classics that you vaguely feel you should read but haven’t yet. Maybe you routinely lie to cover up the fact that you never read Jane Eyre or maybe you totally fess up to the fact that The Great Gatsby was never on a class syllabus. The answer, my friends: graphic novel adaptations.

You guys have no idea how many times I’ve rewritten this blog post now. My inner English major is having conniptions about the fact that I’m advising people, ostensibly, against reading the classics.* And here’s the thing, if you have the time and the means and the patience and the desire and the overall privilege to sit down and read and retain a classic like Great Expectations, exactly as Charles Dickens wrote it, that’s great. You should go do that. I’m told he’s a really fabulous writer and maybe someday I’ll read A Christmas Carol. I was horribly scarred by reading Great Expectations for required summer reading before ninth grade, found the whole thing torturous—not in the least because it cut into my time for reading other, much more fun books—and as a result retained about 3 percent of the story and developed a healthy distaste for ever reading any more Dickens, which I am still trying to get over ten years later. This is all to say: adapting classic works of literature into graphic novel form is absolute genius because it makes them infinitely more accessible.

Whether you have a learning disability or are an English language learner or have no time or simply can’t bear to spend your precious summer vacation time slogging through one single long novel or know that you will never actually take the time to sit down and read a classic because there are so many great books coming out that right now you just need to read, these are for you.

I’ve wanted to read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables since I did the play, and it’s been on my bookshelf for the last five years, but it was one of those I never got around to reading. Then our managing editor handed me the Manga Classics edition and I devoured it in a few hours. While obviously much abridged from the original text, it does cover a little more than the Broadway musical or, for that matter, the most recent movie, manages to. I am tempted to shove a copy of Manga Classics’ version of Pride and Prejudice into the hands of anyone who’s ever told me Jane Austen is dry and boring because Austen’s wry humor and sarcasm is so readily apparent in the art. While I might once have scoffed at the idea of a manga version of the story, it actually goes really, really well together. Mrs. Bennet’s hysterics, Darcy’s melodrama, and Lizzie’s “I am so done with everything” expressions translate beautifully.

Graphic novel adaptations are nothing new, but they do certainly seem to be growing in popularity. And of course the indies have been proving for awhile that they’re not shy when it comes to shaking up the canon. Classical Comics has a version of Great Expectations I’m actually tempted to read. Candlewick Press is bringing the most classical of classics to the masses with adaptations of The Odyssey and Beowulf. Hunt Emerson has managed to turn Dante’s Inferno, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner into comic comedies. And New Paradigm Studios has reimagined Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as African Americans solving cases in present day Harlem.

What do you guys think? Is the idea of graphic novel adaptations of the classics sacrilegious or something you can get behind? What classics do you want to read/have loved reading as graphic novels?

*This is tempered by the fact that the Western canon of literature is mostly by dead white men writing about white men, which is of course incredibly problematic, but not the topic of today’s blog post.

Allyce Amidon is the associate editor at Foreword Reviews, where she blogs about comics and graphic novels. You can follow her on Twitter @allyce_amidon

Allyce Amidon
January 22, 2015

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