History Into Fiction

Have you ever encountered an icon from your childhood that caused the heart to flutter with excitement?

I had one of those rare moments this morning. Framed inside a bold yellow banner and black base were these words set in an antique Western font:

Classics Illustrated.

I was was thumbing through the March 31 edition of Newsweek when I came upon an article announcing the revival of the comic book series by a company called Papercutz (www.papercutz.com). The old Classics Illustrated banner has been retained, but much about the original comics that flourished from 1941 to 1971 is changed. Instead of maintaining the same style throughout the updated series, Papercutz has chosen to recruit artists with widely divergent styles to create unique adaptations of the venerable works. The new Classics Illustrated are sold in hardback for $15, a heady price that may have some parents and teachers thinking twice.

Here’s something I didn’t know: There was a British edition of the Classics Illustrated that produced 162 titles, 13 of which have never appeared in America.

For those who pine for the original versions, Jack Lake Productions (www.jacklakeproductions.com) has been reprinting some of the first-edition comics since 2003.

I wonder how many of my fellow historical novelists were influenced by the Classics Illustrated? I can still remember waiting with keen anticipation for my mother, an English teacher, to bring home a stash of the comics. Many of the titles and their dramatic covers have never faded from memory: Ivanhoe, The Red Badge of Courage, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Last of the Mohicans.

Alas, the comics have had a few detractors over the years. Some cranks questioned the wisdom of compressing great books into fifty pages of cartoons for fear that students would not read the original works when they were older. That seems to me as nonsensical as forbidding kids from playing with toy Civil War muskets because they’ll become too lazy to read Bruce Catton or watch a Ken Burns documentary.