The Graphic Canon Of Children's Literature: The Definitive Anthology of Kid's Lit as Graphics and Visuals

Description

The original three-volume anthology The Graphic Canon presented the world's classic literature - from ancient times to the late 20th century - as eye-popping comics, illustrations and other visual forms. In this follow-up volume, young people's literature through the ages is given new life by the best comics artists and illustrators. Fairy tales, fables, fantastical adventures, young adult novels, swashbuckling yarns, your favorite stories from childhood and your teenage years? they're all here, in all their original complexity and strangeness, uncensored and unsanitised.

Best-selling anthologist RUSS KICK (You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, among others) informed a whole generation of Americans with the hard truths of American politics and created a media frenzy for being the first to publish suppressed photographs of American flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. The New York Times dubbed Kick "an information archaeologist," Details magazine described him as "a Renaissance man," and Utne Reader named him one of its "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." Then, in 2009, Kick embarked on an entirely new kind of project, returning to his love of literature and art, and to comics art in particular. For his groundbreaking new series of books The Graphic Canon, Kick has commissioned new work from over 170 artists, as well as reintroduced existing work that wasn't easy to find. With over 35,000 copies in print of the first three volumes, TheGraphic Canon series has been welcomed by a wide range of different types of media, from traditional print to comics blogs, from NPR and the New York Times to Wired and Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog, which have all hailed Kick as a visionary, expanding readers' visual vocabulary through the creation of a new kind of canon.

"A masterful success. If [Russ Kick would] unleash several other loose Canons, I'd be living happily ever after." -Print Magazine "Some of history's most skillful wielding of tales has refused to bend to the false divide between "children's" and "adult" storytelling ... On the heels of the year's best children's books comes a magnificent embodiment of that ethos in The Graphic Canon of Children's Literature" -Maria Popova, Brain Pickings "These dazzlingly varied renderings run the gamut from haunting to comical while offering visceral reminders that children's stories are often densely layered, infinitely transposable, and peddle in imagery both macabre and whimsical. It is the unfettered imagination of these stories that make them not only wildly entertaining, but also vessels of forgotten truths." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)