Interpreting Great Art Through Comics

Consider being able to read "Moby Dick" in 64 pages or "The Bible" as illustrated art and think of the whole new audience those works would attract. Then ponder the fantastical results if Tennessee Williams wrote "Little Orphan Annie" or Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Dennis the Menace."

As you can see, life in artist Robert Sikoryak's world holds endless possibilities. He shared some of them with an audience last week at the Huntington Public Library to hear his talk, "Masterpiece Comics: Looking at Literature through the Cartoon Medium."

For about the past 100 years, comics have been seen as a gateway into literature and there's been a history of adapting classics for a wider audience. There's been a resurgence of interest in such adaptations, he said, pointing to cartoonist Robert Crumb's illustrated "The Book of Genesis," published in 2009.

"I love literature and I love comics, so I try to combine the two," Sikoryak said.

The freelance writer and illustrator received his BFA from Parsons School of Design, where he is on staff. His work includes a book released in 2009 called "Masterpiece Comics," which re-imagines classic literature in the style of a comic strip -- a comic called "Inferno Joe," in the style that appears on bubblegum wrappers; Beavis and Butthead in "Waiting To Go," a take on Beckett's "Waiting For Godot"; and "Little Pearl" in the style of Little Lulu in a retelling of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." He also has drawn parodies for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In a thumbnail history of comics, Sikoryak recounted different eras in comics, from how early cartoonist Ed Wheelan had Don K. Haughty and Pancho Stanza tilting at gin mills rather than Cervantes' windmills and Milt Gross did 30-panel screwball adaptations of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" and William Faulkner's "The Wild Palms," to the more standard four-color adaptations of "The Bible" and novels such as "Moby Dick."

"They leaned toward the classics because the stories were in the public domain and copyright-free," Sikoryak said.

Albert Kantor started adapting famous books with his "Classics Illustrated" series, and the 62-page adaptations often included two pages of text at the end to give readers the story line. "When Shakespeare was adapted, the New York Times wrote an article about it since it was seen as a big deal," he said.

Kantor kept the classic adaptations in print and the quality increased, evidenced by an increase in price. "They were trying to class it up a little bit," he said, and at the end of the book they would run a notice urging readers to read the original.

Comics are a flexible medium, Sikoryak noted. Their content ranged from educational, with classic novels and Bible stories, to entertainment and horror stories when the "Tales from the Crypt" series was introduced. "It was high culture meeting low culture," Sikoryak said. There were complaints that comics caused juvenile delinquency, and there were even Senate hearings about the impact of comic books on youth in 1954. The result was the formation of the Comics Magazines Association of America Inc. and a code for posting a CCA rating stamp on covers.

After the horror and crime comics of the 1950s came underground and alternative comics in the '80s and '90s. "Classics Illustrated" was revived in the 1990s and "Moby Dick" was again condensed. Today, Sikoryak said, there's a manga version of Shakespeare and a pop-up book about "Moby Dick."

Sikoryak's talk was the second in the library's Speakers in the Humanities series.