How I Learned About Great Literature from Comic Books
Over the course of 169 issues, Classics Illustrated gave me a taste for mind-expanding reading that lasted a lifetime
My childhood nostalgia is different from others.
When in sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I don’t mull over madeleine cookies or a sled called Rosebud. I don’t even lament the time Mom threw out all my baseball cards—probably worth a small fortune today.
But I do wax nostalgic for my old Classics Illustrated comic books—a now forgotten legacy of mid-20th century American optimism. The basic idea was that the same kids who wasted their free time following the exploits of Batman and Superman, would enthusiastically turn their attention to Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante.
There was just one catch: These timeless icons of culture first needed to be turned into fast-paced comic books with gaudy cover art.
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Shakespeare scholars might tell you that Hamlet is a tragic drama about the dangers of indecision and family betrayal. But the folks at Classics Illustrated knew it was also a ghost story—with Hamlet’s dad spooking the whole bloody castle.
Odysseus doesn’t even show up on the cover of the Classics Illustrated version of The Odyssey. Hey, it’s so much cooler to show a one-eyed Cyclops throwing a huge boulder at escaping sailors.
But the time saved was just as much a feature as the pulp fiction covers. I could spend months trying to read all 1,300 pages of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. But I blew through the comic version over a milkshake at Fosters Freeze.
There were 169 issues of Classics Illustrated during my childhood. The first issue, an exciting adaptation of The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas—an immensely popular novelist of mixed French and Afro-Caribbean ancestry—appeared in October 1941, and was soon followed by Ivanhoe (by Sir Walter Scott) and The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas again).
I loved it. I bet Steven Spielberg did too.
As each new issue arrived in the newsstands and five-and-dime stores of America, something strange started to happen. Not only did each installment sell well, but demand for earlier issues continued to grow—so reprints were required.
Some issues went through twenty or more printings. In the ephemeral world of comic books, this demand for a back catalog was unprecedented. In fact, many of the issues I collected as a youngster were more than a quarter of a century old when I bought them—and I never even noticed.
The series was the brainchild of Russian immigrant Albert Kanter, who dreamed of introducing children to great works of literature via comic books. He was no scholar. In fact, Kanter was a high school dropout whose formal education ended at age 16.
But I have a lot of sympathy for working class people who take books seriously—as I mentioned in my most recent article here. For many of us, Classics Illustrated were stepping stones to the real deal.
Opinion leaders nowadays would scorn these graphic novels. They would justifiably point out the narrowness of canon enshrined in their garish pages (even though, as the recurring presence of Afro-French author Dumas indicates, there was more range here than you might assume).
They would deride the corny images, loaded with anachronisms and stereotypes. And they would probably mock the middle-class aspirations of parents who bought these ten-cent classics for their children. It’s all so embarrassingly middle-brow.
But maybe we need more middle-brow in our culture mix today.
When I compare Classics Illustrated with the entertainment fare of today’s youngsters—who are well-informed about the pros and cons of various first-person shooter games and the wardrobe choices of Instagram influencers—I think I’ll give those old comic books a pass.
Sure, I’d also like to see a wide range of titles from different cultures—hey, the Egyptian Book of the Dead would make for a very cool comic book—but almost every book adapted for the series was genuinely worth reading.
New issues had already stopped appearing by the time I first noticed Classics Illustrated. Kanter stopped releasing titles in 1962—and probably didn’t need any more, given the cash flow coming from the back catalog. In 1967, he sold the business to Twin Circle Publishing, which made a token effort to continue the series, adding two more titles before deciding to focus on reprints and overseas distribution instead.
In truth, the late 1960s weren’t a good time to sell canonical texts. On the other hand, this was exactly the moment when Classics Illustrated could have participated in the broadening of the canon. Alas, it never happened.
So the series now serves as a time capsule, similar to other attempts to create a systematic guide to inherited culture from that same era—much like the Harvard “Five-Foot Shelf” or Mortimer Adler’s Great Books of the Western World, published by the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Critics can mock those as middle-brow, too—if they dare. But maybe they should read them first.
A few years after the Classics Illustrated series came to a halt, I got a recommended book list from a local high school suggesting that prospective ninth graders read James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Harper Lee, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Anne Frank, and other authors who were altering our notions of the limits and extent of the literary world. These titles would have been well suited for graphic novel treatment. I wish Classics Illustrated had made the plunge before disappearing from the newstands of America.
And as I look upon more recent literary novelists, many are perfect candidates for Classics Illustrated treatment. Some of those Haruki Murakami stories already read like graphic novels. And even I would buy a Classics Illustrated edition of David Foster Wallace or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o or Kazuo Ishiguro or Donna Tartt.
Don’t underestimate the long term impact of childhood exposure. A recent Gallup poll confirms that Americans are reading fewer books nowadays. And it isn’t hard to grasp why that’s the case in our screen-dominated culture. The pattern is set early in life.
For my part, I later went on and read most of the actual books adapted into Classics Illustrated editions. They seemed like familiar friends even before I opened the first page—if only because I had already made their acquaintance in comic book form.
Many of these books remain cherished sources of wisdom so many decades later. That’s something worth getting nostalgic about—or, even better, finding a way to pass on to future generations.
If it can happen with fun, collectible comic books, so much the better.
Wonderful article! We had similar youthful experiences with Classics Illustrated. You might enjoy my book, CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED: A CULTURAL HISTORY, now in its third edition (McFarland, 2024). The original CI series is currently being reissued under license by a British publisher, CCS Books.
One of my favorite professors at the University of Colorado in the Department of English mostly taught folklore, Old Norse and Norse Mythology. Every few years he was required to teach an English Lit or American Lit 101 course which required refreshing his own memory of various classics. I remarked once how that could be a time-consuming matter on top of his ongoing research in his favored fields. He showed me his “secret weapon,” a complete set of Classics Illustrated comics he had compiled starting in his childhood.