October 25, 2009

Not Your Mother's Literary Classics

Penguin

In 2005, Penguin began asking famous cartoonists to redesign covers for a series, Graphic Classics. Above, a cover by Daniel Clowes.

Enlarge Image

By Elizabeth Alsop

I was browsing in a bookstore recently when a copy of Little Women caught my eye. The cover featured crude, inky sketches of the March sisters, arrayed in a quadrant. They seemed to be suffering from a collective bad hair day. "Oh God please!" Meg laments in the thought bubble over her head. "My skin is so bad I want to grow up, and fast!" Next to her, Amy reads from a Bible, sounding like an evangelical Molly Bloom ("Yes Yes God says hey girls be good …") while the sickly