Remember all those awful Penguin Classics and other books we were forced to read against our wills in high school and college? Remember how painful they were? Now with the wisdom of years I look back on those books and my god so many of them are still terrible, but check out what they’ve done with the covers! All of a sudden, I’m thinking man, this Moby Dick looks like an action adventure I could really get into, rather than some overstuffed tome I somehow avoided reading in high school. Look at that whale! It’s jumping out of the water like one of those great whites on Shark Week! I mean come on! How could you not want to read this book?
And Wurthering Heights! It looks so intriguing and mysterious, like something your cool artsy friend sketched in their binder during math class. It like, totally gets you, and like sucks you in and before you know it you’re entrenched in some mediocre story from the least impressive member of the Bronte crew.
The Frankenstein I read in high school was a mere 100 pages or so–every one of them insufferable. But this, this actually looks cool. Granted the entire book isn’t in comic book form, but all of a sudden I want to know more.
And check out the author bio, even that’s done as a comic. So much more interesting.
I include my BFF Kurt Vonnegut here as well, simply because the spines of these books include a shout out to Vonnegut fans who know that that asterisk isn’t an asterisk at all. Mwahaha…inside joke!
The Stranger offers a side-by-side look at the before and after of Vonnegut’s redesigned books. Maybe it’s because he’s gone to that big clam bake in the sky, but I think using Vonnegut’s own drawings and handwriting is far more interesting than whatever geometric thing they had going on before.
