Classics Illustrated
Classics Illustrated is a name with a long and illustrious history that published comic retellings of classic tales from 1941-1971. In it’s time it was hugely successful, but that time was long, long ago and to be honest I’ve always seen it as something of a cultural dinosaur, that came across as rather boring and just seemed like the teacher approved texts of the comics world.
I most fondly remember the series when it was brought back by First Comics in 1990 with a host of big name alternative writers and artists handling the adaptation. I remember Bill Sienkienvicz, P. Craig Russell, Kyle Baker and Gahan Wilson being involved. However, despite the big names, the comics industry had changed so much that the educational content of Classics Illustrated just couldn’t generate enough sales in comic shops at the time and it didn’t last more than a year. Now, some 18 years later Classic Comic Store Ltd has brought the line back, but instead of giving us new material they’ve chosen to reprint the comics in the original series, that ran from the 40s to the 70s. They intention is to sell them cheaply; £2.99 for nearly 50 pages and aim for the schools and library market to reach a new audience of children.
(Classics Illustrated – interior art by Reed Crandall and George Evans from Oliver Twist)
So inside each issue you get a classic tale illustrated for a previous time. And to be honest it’s just a little too bland for my tastes, with a very dry retelling and a series of rather static pages, all very well done perhaps, all anatomically correct and with the occasional moment of antiquated charm, but still feeling like the sort of comics you’re told are educationally approved. So each title is as good or as bad as you’d think, it’s all going to depend on your age and your artistic sensibilities. They tell the classic stories simply and without fuss, but for me they also do it without much excitement either. Of course, there are exceptions; like Reed Crandall’s beautiful artwork in War Of The Worlds, but even then, the story just drags the artwork down and spoils it somewhat.
(Classics Illustrated War Of The Worlds, art by Lou Cameron.)
And that might have been the end of it. I’d have just finished there and had done with it, but Molly caught sight of them and wondered what they were. She stole them away and had a good look through some of the ones she thought looked interesting. An she liked them an awful lot more than I did. Thinking that this would be a good idea to take further, I donated the comics to Molly’s school, with the proviso that I wanted to hear what they thought of them. And by and large they all rather enjoyed them. Indeed, for many of them, these were some of the first comics they’d actually read. Which says a lot more about the sad state of comics than anything else.
So Classics Illustrated is a bit of a strange beast. I can’t see them making any impact at all in the comic shops and I can’t see many comic folks really liking them as the material they’re reprinting just isn’t the sort of thing that we remember fondly. Even an appreciation of some of the artists represented is better done with their other work. But there may well be a small but enthusiastic market for them within the education sector and in libraries looking to expand the graphic novel section with something a little more educational than the latest Spider-Man collection. And children will read them, and they will enjoy them, because comics in any form, even something a little bland for the eyes of this reader, still appeal greatly to children.
Classics Illustrated is published in the UK by Classic Comic Store Ltd : website.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
You mischaracterize the demise of First’s Classics Illustrated line. It lasted somewhat over a year (I forget how long) and at one point was doing so well the company officially changed its name to Classics Illustrated. Comic shops were irrelevant to its sales; First had cut a deal with Berkley Books to distribute the line, and Berkley did a phenomenal sales job, putting display cases (known as dumps) in bookstores all over the country, where sell-through was also phenomenal. The new Classics comics were ridiculously successful, though since they were largely sold outside the comics market and the comics distribution change the sales figures weren’t included among standard comics sales figures, so as far as Capital and Diamond were concerned the line was a bust. What killed Classics was Berkley’s insistence that the company print up gobs and gobs of copies, all distributed on a returnable basis, which is common policy for book publishing and book distribution. While CIs were being placed in their point-of-purchase dumps and being pushed, they did fantastically. As soon as Berkley moved on to other promotions, CI titles were almost immediately marginalized in bookstores, hidden away on shelves (bookstores had no idea what to classify such a product as for standard shelving; many didn’t think it was right to stock, say, a comics adaptation of The Count Of Monte Cristo next to the prose version so CIs would commonly be lost in the humor section, graphic novel sections being unknown then) and generally put out of sight of the audiences previously buying them. Since First/CI had drastically increased the CI output on the basis of those first eight measured months of releases, it wasn’t long, since Berkley had demanded substantial print runs, before First drowned in returns they has no financial capacity to absorb. Even at that point sales would have been respectable for a direct market that printed to order and had few returns, while revenues from the line took months to make their way down the chain into First’s hands. Publishing for the book market is a tricky business, and it’s easy to be done in by your cash flow. First and Classics Illustrated were, despite a strong start. But sales in comics shops didn’t enter into it.
April 7th, 2009 at 1:01 am
A number of the First CI issues are being reprinted right now by Papercutz (along with some volumes of I think all-new material). They’ve done Gahan Wilson’s Edgar Allan Poe book and one of the Rick Geary ones (Great Expectations?), and have Steven Grant and Tom Mandrake’s Hamlet on deck (in case Mr. Grant didn’t know…).
And I assume that Moby Dick book by Bill Sienkiewicz and Dan Chichester coming out from Image is a reprint of the the First CI one…
April 8th, 2009 at 12:50 am
No, no one mentioned Hamlet to me, thanks. I hope they have the addresses to send the royalty checks to…
April 9th, 2009 at 4:17 am
Steven,
http://www.papercutz.com/class.....home2.html
Man, I’d forgotten how gorgeous Tom Mandrake’s art was in that, maybe second only to the better issues of THE SPECTRE he did.
I remember reading somewhere that the publisher said Geary was getting something for the reprint of his work, but I don’t know if that was just because he has an on-going relationship with the parent publisher NBM (not being privy to the wording of the contract, which you obviously are).
February 25th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
I used to collect these religiously, as a kid. It was a fantastic series and much prized. I have steadily been collecting them again on eBay as heirlooms for my grandchildren. Now, I’ll just buy the modern versions.
As a result of my passion for C.I. I became something of a quiz kid, in the literature section!