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GRAPHIC CLASSICS: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
edited by Tom Pomplun
($9.95,
Eureka Productions)
Review by Mark Campos
This is the latest in a series featuring public domain – er, classic works by great authors, illustrated in a variety of ways by cartoonists both well-known and obscure. This time around it's Robert Louis Stevenson, and as expected, the adaptation of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", here illustrated by Simon Gane and Michael Slack, is impenetrable. Same for "The Suicide Club", illustrated by Pedro Lopez; if you're going to put your eyes to this much work, better to read the original stories. The third long story, "The Bottle Imp", is illustrated by Lance Tooks in a light and eye-pleasing style, and though the story sort of wobbles to a conclusion, it doesn't hurt to read it through.
The real fun is in the "Verses and Fables" section, featuring poems and short tales adapted by a number of folks (Frank Stack! Anne Timmons! Hunt Emerson! Johnny Ryan, for God's sake!) in a number of styles ranging from decorative to irreverent. There are four new pages from Shary Flenniken here, always a cause for celebration.
The revelation here is that RLS was not merely a writer of stirring adventure tales. A number of the shorter pieces show his darker, more philosophic side. "The Distinguished Stranger", illustrated by Rico Schacherl, depicts a visitor from another planet mistaking trees for the dominant life form on Earth; introduced to men who are described to him as "the people of the greatest nation in the world", he says "They scarcely look so." The Flenniken-drawn story, "The Yellow Paint", is a scathing satire, as a doctor promises that his yellow paint will shield a man from pain and suffering, and when it doesn't work comes up with ingenious rationalizations for its failure. And then there's "Now Bare To the Beholder's Eye", a saucy poem (illustrated by Michael Manning, every corset-strap carefully delineated), which describes how the ladies armor themselves up with "beribboned battlements" during the day; but at night they shed the "inhumanities", and "forth leaps the laughing girl at last".
And, on the subject of "Treasure Island", both Maxon and Robert Crumb weigh in with reminiscences of the effect Robert Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver in the Disney film had on their brother Charles. Bob's "Treasure Island Days" is a reprint, but it's good to see it again, and there's a page from one of the Crumb brothers' "two-man" comics featuring Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey.
This series is popular with librarians, who imagine that it'll open young readers' minds to classic literature. A more likely effect will be some young library crawler's first exposure, through this volume, to Crumb and Roger Langridge and other great cartoonists. (Not to mention Manning. Woo!) The volume-after-next in this series will be stories of O. Henry, and it's a lead-pipe cinch it'll be a darb.
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