Comics Poetry: The Adapted Victor Hugo

From Booklist
At their most ambitious, the 1940s and '50s Classics Illustrated comics grippingly visualized several Shakespeare plays, Homer's epics, and even Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. But CI never attempted lyric and reflective poetry, as does this book in which 13 French artists visualize short poems by the nineteenth-century romantic whom the French deem their greatest poet but English-only readers recognize for his novels, especially The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables. Each piece reconceives its poem narratively. Efix envisions the rueful sonnet "Pretty Girls" as a handful of young suitors' vying courtship of the same few beauties. Alfred renders the elegiac "At dawn tomorrow . . ." as the thoughts of a man going to visit a loved one's grave. Each adaptation is prefaced by its text, printed with the proper line breaks (but sometimes crabbedly translated), and a relevant bit of Hugo's biography. There is color throughout, though "Vivar," recounting a legend of El Cid, is pale tan and black, and the variety of mannerist (as opposed to realistic) comics styles is pleasingly varied. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Booklist
"Pleasingly varied."


Book Description
From France, this series will present the best poems of various authors put to comics by a bevy of talented cartoonists. The full poem in its original form is first presented and then its visualized counterpart.


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From France, this series will present the best poems of various authors put to comics by a bevy of talented cartoonists. The full poem in its original form is first presented and then its visualized


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices