Quoting Poe

A lot of people don’t seem to believe that apparently disparate interests can co-exist, or can be adequately reconciled. There’s one stereotype, for instance, that readers of books can’t also be readers of comic books, or that if they somehow are, there are bound to be deficiencies in their critical thinking. Readers of comic books, for instance, probably need to rely on things like variations of ILLUSTRATED CLASSICS to appreciate the written word by itself, adaptations that translate known material to a form they can digest, that shares the same patterns.

All of this is to say, nah, I don’t believe that, not for one minute. Maybe I really am the rare readers who can appreciate Melville’s CONFIDENCE-MAN and, say, JOE PSYCHO & MOO-FROG, I don’t know. I only know that inspiration is inspiration, and sometimes, those lines can be blurred more than most people are apparently willing to admit.

NEVERMORE: A GRAPHIC ADAPTATION OF EDGAR ALLAN POE’S SHORT STORIES is a prime example. Poe is one of the giants of American literature, someone every school kid has some experience with, whether from “The Raven” or “The Tell-tale Heart,” both among the ten short stories, including a biography that highlights suitably unsettling aspects of his death, featured in this collection. A bevy of small-press creators come together to offer their interpretations of Poe’s works, some shifting the timeframes a little, but each of them remaining faithful to the original scripts, psychological tales that remain as compelling today as when they were originally published.

Perhaps the element that truly makes them pop is that the artwork is in black and white, a format that few fans seem willing to embrace (perhaps not so surprising, given that modern comics virtually pride themselves in the sophistication of their coloring).