Edgar Allan Poe Review

EDGAR ALLAN POE REVIEW

Spring 2002

Review by Stephen Rachman

I must confess that as I sat down to read Rosebud Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe (Issue 1, 2001), a compilation by various artists and illustrators of classic Poe stories and poems, my attention was not undivided. The comic book had competition from the TV. I was about to turn it off when ABC's latest prime time game show, The Chair, came on. John McEnroe, the most tortured of tennis' great champions, has found a second career tormenting contestants as they vie for $250,000 in prize money by answering questions while strapped into a supercharged dental chair that measures their heart rate. In order to win, contestants must not only answer all questions correctly but also keep their beating hearts under control while subjected to the host's awkward banter calculated to unnerve, flames that emerge from the floor, bursting balloons and even a live alligator dangled inches from the face. In the ordeal, contestants are revved like engines, their palpitations monitored and displayed like a red-lining tachometer. Each time a human heart flutters too fast, prize money drains away like blood from an embalmed corpse. How, I wondered, could the lowly medium of comic art or Graphic Classics with its pen and ink sketches in glorious black and white compete with The Chair, a game show that seems to be hatched from the mind of Poe himself? How, for example, could Rick Geary's capable but unremarkable storyboarding of "The Tell-Tale Heart" compete with a show that makes the murmurs of anybody's tell-tale heart visible on screen and throws in "The Pit and the Pendulum" no extra charge?

It may not exactly be a fair comparison but it may be an inevitable one, and it may also be one that is invited by this new compilation. Graphic Classics finds itself in the surprising position of being a representative of a slightly stodgier pop cultural medium, an instrument of pop canonization--like a new edition of collected stories--while the horror of Poe may be conveyed through the crasser vehicle of a game show. However, as Poe was the arch-theorist of that class of compositions "not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour," it is still altogether fitting that a medium such as the comic book that has either rightly or wrongly been accused of catering to the minimal attention span would continue to promote Poe. In his introduction to Graphic Classics, "The East Texas Po' Kid Finds Poe and Hopes You Will Too," Joe R. Lansdale (an author who also writes comics), describes himself in rather conventional terms as an invalid, bookish lad growing up in an East Texas cultural vacuum during the 1950s and 60s. Bookishness in this case means that he read comics and, when he "wanted something stronger," he turned to Poe . And so we have a clear articulation of Poe's cultural status for a popular segment of postwar America. Baby boomer Poe is a cultural figure who has more in common with Rod Serling, Twihght Zone episodes, and Roger Corman films than American literature, nineteenth-century romanticism, or even Vincent Price. Lansdale writes that the volume is "dedicated to the work of that genteel mad man, Poe", and putting aside the question of whether or not he is promoting the old canard about Poe's insanity, this reader gets the feeling that he means it in the sense that, say, Ted Nugent, is billed the "Motor City Mad Man." Poe was outrageous, dude, and Graphic Classics is intended to inspire a new generation that loves comics to love Poe.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. Comic art versions of Poe's writings have been appearing with regularity in the last fifty years, perhaps even greater regularity than film, video, and, oh yes, print versions. Of course, the popular tales--"The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "The Gold Bug," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher"--have received ample treatment. Detective, Horror, Weird, and Science fiction have all been staples of comics and so Poe's contributions to these genres have all found ready representation in graphic form. In perhaps the most ambitious recent effort, C. Auguste Dupin himself lives on as a quasi-superhero in Allan Moore's and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000) series.

Graphic Classics brings together seven adaptations of poems, four stories, a biographical vignette about Poe's death ("The Inheritance of Rufus Griswold"), and a takeoff written by Clive Barker and illustrated by Mark A. Nelson, "New Murders in the Rue Morgue." The editors have also wisely sprinkled a number of striking illustrations from Maxon 's Poe (1997) by Maxon Crumb (brother of Robert). Perhaps the greatest strength of the issue is the wide range of modes of pictorial representation. One finds conventional storyboard panels familiar to all