More masterpieces, R.!

So I read Masterpiece Comics, and it was terrific. I've written about it effusively, even fannishly, at GoodReads:

Masterpiece Comics by Robert Sikoryak

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book of short comics depicting stories from classic literature written and drawn in the style of familiar comic strips and comic books, usually with characters from the comics playing the roles of characters from the classics. This is a brilliant idea, but there are two distinct pitfalls Sikoryak has to avoid in order to make it work:

It can't be a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, painfully self-aware exercise in which the characters are constantly saying, "Hoho, we're little cartoon characters putting on Daddy's big literature boots! Aren't we all adorable and intellectual?" That joke gets old fast.

At the other extreme, it can't turn into a Classics Illustrated sort of thing in which the comics characters look like themselves but fully take on the personalities of the classic characters. The novelty value of Batman just rattling off lines from Crime and Punishment would lose its novelty value after about two panels.

But Sikoryak bypasses both of those dangers and instead creates something completely original, something that makes this weird idea live up to its full potential. His hybrid stories remain true to everything that's ridiculous, endearing, and true about the comics, and they illuminate the greatness and profundity (and occasional silliness) of the classics.

For example, take the rendition here of poor Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, with his outer insect state reflecting his inner alienation and existential crises. Through Sikoryak's twisted lens, we get a Kafka/Charles Schulz mashup in "Good Ol' Gregor Brown," in which the poor transformed fellow scuttles around in the familiar yellow-and-black shirt. It makes the weirdest kind of sense, doesn't it? Not that Peanuts ever got quite as bleak as Kafka, but it is, at heart, a deeply sad comic about a sincere, put-upon kid who can never get a break. The brilliance of this juxtaposition can be summed up in one line spoken by Lucy as Gregor's sister, Grete: "GREGOR, YOU BLOCKHEAD!"

There are so many other great examples—eleven of them, to be exact—in which material is skillfully matched to other material. Here's Little Nemo as Dorian Gray: "What? The portrait has changed! What a cruel expression! Um! Maybe I should apologize to Sibyl." This is a truly clever book by an artist with the utmost love and respect for works that have lasted and things that were once wrongly thought entirely disposable.



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 So there's that. But now I'm constantly thinking about what other masterpieces of comics and older literature Sikoryak could combine. It's a little tricky because the juxtaposition of each comic and classic has to be compatible and resonant without being too obvious. The least interesting story in Masterpiece Comics was the adaptation of Wuthering Heights as a Tales from the Crypt-style revenge horror tale. It's good fun, but it's less interesting than the rest of the collection because of course there are clear parallels between a ferocious Gothic novel of overheated passions and EC Comics' grotesquerie. So I wouldn't necessarily like to see anything so on-the-nose again. Anything like Heart of Darkness as a Tarzan-style jungle adventure would be plain cheating.

With that in mind, I've come up with a few ideas of my own:

"Something Is Festering in the Filthy Gutter of Denmark." Hamlet and Watchmen, with Rorschach as the prince. I'm not exactly sure how this would work; I just think it's a brilliant idea. There's the shared philosophical pessimism, the constant threat of violence and war, the protagonist's unresolvable parental issues, and the final high body count. Hamlet's antic disposition becomes Rorschach's ever-changing mask. Awesome.

"The Strange Case of Doctor Hobbes and Mister Calvin." I'm sure that a few hundred master's theses have been written by now about Hobbes and the nature of imagination and reality, so this one almost writes itself: just turn the tables and have Calvin be an ingrained but autonomous part of Hobbes's psyche. I really, really want to to see Hobbes as a symbol of Victorian reserve and repression, with Calvin's evil grin representing, as it often already does in the comics, the id run amuck. Yay.

"The Importance of Being Leroy." I'm kind of wincing at this idea, which would mean combining a play I love with a comic I hate. But the combination of Doctor Faustus and Garfield worked so well. And, really, when you strip things down to their essence, aren't the hateful one-liners in The Lockhorns just a neanderthal version of the brilliant ripostes in The Importance of Being Earnest? No, no, they're actually really not. Never mind. Forget about this one. It's a terrible idea. It seemed fascinating for just a moment. But no.

I also have a vague idea that Scott Pilgrim would work well as Tom Jones based on plot summaries and their shared tendency to digress, but I haven't actually read Tom Jones, so I can't really back up that one. I also have this weird impression that there's something Dickensian buried somewhere in Bloom County, but I can't think of anything coherent to do with that either. The solution, of course, is for Sikoryak to furnish us with more Masterpiece Comics and make it snappy. More, I say.

Future reading?

All right. Time to take another crack at this whole “regularly updated blog” thing.

Any given day, I usually remember all the books I’m in the middle of reading, and I tend to be pretty confident about what I’m going to read next. But I generally can’t predict what I’m going to read after that. My ongoing mental reading list fluctuates constantly, depending on which books I have checked out from the library, how work was this week, what the weather is like, and many other basically unmanageable factors. I devote a probably unseemly amount of mental energy to remembering five to ten books I would be reading right now, all at once, if I had that much brain and that many eyes. Sometimes I scribble out some titles in a notebook, but I’ve found that such lists are all too easily ignored or forgotten once written. So I assumed, until yesterday afternoon, that I had to encumber my mind with all these tantalizing book titles until I got around to reading them: that is to say, forever.

And then it dawned on me—dawned aggressively, almost irritatingly, as if my brain had east-facing windows and I’d left the blinds open a crack the night before so that the sun was prematurely obtruding on my slumber: “Oho! I have this three-year-old blog in which I rarely post anything because procrastination is such a finely honed skill of mine.  Keeping track of my fluctuating reading plans is actually a good use for such a blog. Instead of trying to remember all these book titles in my head, I shall publicly list them for my own benefit and the edification of the internet. Tra-la!”

Yes, I’m afraid my inner monologue actually sounds like that a lot of the time. I try to cope. Moving on to the books bottlenecked at the top of my to-read pile:

King City (424-page Catmonster), Brandon Graham

I’ve never quite figured out how to describe it. It’s a comic, stylistically similar to manga, set in a hilariously violent, dystopian city. It’s about a guy named Joe, a master thief, more or less, who has been specially trained as a cat master. His cat, Earthling, is a smart, relaxed, always slit-eyed creature who can do just about anything, become any tool or weapon, if given the right injection. That’s every bit as strange as it sounds, and it just gets weirder from there. There are noirish things happening in the story, with gangsters and a femme fatale and so forth, but the main thing is that you get to spend time with these characters in this weird, awesome world. I read the first third or so of King City last year, as the first volume of a projected series, and then found out that further publication of the series had been delayed for years; now the whole thing is finally available in one handy volume, which I will probably inhale in one sitting later this month.

Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak

I’m a sucker for comics that make clever use of the classics. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is awesome that way; so is everything I’ve read by Michael Kupperman. But this guy, this Sikoryak... this man takes things to a new level. He can do near-perfect imitations of the drawing and writing styles of past and present comics artists—everyone from Winsor McCay to Jim Davis—and what he’s done is to recast classic works of literature in the style of those comics, with the drawn characters both retaining their own personalities and taking on the personas of the older literary figures. It’s both completely ridiculous and entirely appropriate: you end up with mashups like “Mac Worth” (Macbeth/Mary Worth), “Little Dori in Pictureland” (The Picture of Dorian Gray/Little Nemo in Slumberland), and, believe it or not, even “Candiggy” (Candide/Ziggy). I’ve read a few of the strips and now I must read all the rest. And then Sikoryak needs to furnish me with several more books like this.

2030, Albert Brooks

Brooks gave a great interview on The Daily Show last year promoting his first novel, which is about the eponymous year in which he predicts things actually will go to hell in America. He’s a funny man, so I put this book on my library holds list. Now I have a copy ready and waiting for me. End of story.

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

Now that I’m finally actually writing again, it’s past time to revisit the most practical, understanding, passionate, funny book about writing I’ve ever read. The third chapter alone—”Shitty First Drafts”—has been more helpful to me than most other books on the same subject. Consciously or otherwise, I’ve been using it to fight writer’s block since I was sixteen.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

My vague plans to read some Dickens sometime began to crystallize a few months ago after I read so many salutary articles, blog posts, and tweets on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. I want to read one of his most beloved books. David Copperfield? Nah, Jamie and I have been planning to read that one together, and she’s a bit busy for it right now. Bleak House? That somehow seems like more of an autumnal book, something good to read in October. Great Expectations it is.

So there it is. At the moment, I fully intend to read all of those as soon as possible. We’ll see how that works out.