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Reviewed by:
  • The Graphic Canon Vols. 1-3 ed. by Russ Kick
  • Sarah E. Cornish
Russ Kick, ed. The Graphic Canon. Vol. 1. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. 502p.
Russ Kick, ed. The Graphic Canon. Vol. 2. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. 500p.
Russ Kick, ed. The Graphic Canon. Vol. 3. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013. 564p.

First and foremost, reading ought to deliver pleasure. When good literature is combined with striking visuals, as Russ Kick’s anthologies in The Graphic Canon series indeed provide, that pleasure intensifies. The critic self is stripped away, loosened, released. The childhood self who used to sit on a rug in the closet, surrounded by stuffed animals and picture books, swims up to the surface and relishes the pleasure of thick pages, sweeping colors, and complicated images that one might carefully examine for a long time. But, oh, Kick’s collection is not for kids. Many of the three books’ images depict moral query, sexual expression, and violent struggle. The images deliver. In a talk given shortly before his death and in reflecting over his forty years of teaching literature, Alan Purves reminds us that we can read images in the same way we do poetry. He writes, “We make a grave mistake if we see literature only as print; it has only been print for a brief period, two hundred years.” The image, Purves argues, deserves as much attention as the words on the page. As readers and consumers of culture, we have a canon of images at our disposal, a canon just as crucial to our comprehension of the world as the canon of printed words. The volumes in Kick’s series capitalize on the way literature manifests oceans of images and while urging us to rethink the value of canonicity.

While the notion of canonicity has certainly come under fire in recent years, owing to the profession’s desire to expose students of literature to more writers of color, writers who are women, and writers who write in genre-bending ways, Kick’s anthologies work to explore the breadth of the canon including a significant portion of “A-list Western literature” (Vol. 1 1). However, as Kick contacted various graphic artists and illustrators, the list came to also include work from Japan, China, India, Tibet, religious and spiritual texts, philosophy, bawdy material, ancient Greek drama, medieval writings, fairy tales (Vol.1 1), and even unknown, rare works, such as Hemingway’s “A Matter of Colour,” an early story written while he was in high school (Vol. 3 138). Volume One spreads its wings from The Epic of Gilgamesh to The Inferno to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons. Volume Two begins with “Kubla Khan” and ends with The Picture of Dorian Gray and includes Romantic and Victorian delights such as “She Walks in Beauty,” [End Page 284] “The Raven,” and Middlemarch along the way. Volume Three jettisons readers into the twentieth century with key texts such as Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, Animal Farm, The Stranger, The Bell Jar, and closes with the greatest novel about tennis ever written, Infinite Jest. The rendering of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), is a particular standout. Caroline Picard illustrates a key scene in which Rachel Vinrace tells her Aunt Helen she’s been kissed by a man for the first time. Picard’s “sinuous, flowing style” (Vol. 3 111) supports the narrative’s meandering through Rachel’s sheltered and confused mind. That Picard chooses Woolf’s first novel over more canonical works presses on the collection’s challenge to canonicity and asks us to remember, in the case of The Voyage Out, (which includes Clarissa and Richard Dalloway as minor characters) that a start can lead to later, major works. Being exposed to the start of a writer’s career, as in the case of the Woolf and Hemingway selections, may encourage a deeper appreciation of their better-known works. Included in each volume are descriptive and highly accessible paragraphs of further reading for each text represented. For example, about Mary Wollstonecraft, Liz Byer writes, “Wollstonecraft’s ur-feminist text remains a hugely important work for bluestockings and latter-day...

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