Our title deliberately evokes the comic book series Classics Illustrated to offer both an investigation and a reconsideration of the ways the comics medium engages with non-graphic literature. Comics have long had an association with other literary works, as the medium often retells, reworks, reimagines, or continues many other narratives. Frequently, comics achieve their intended purpose through the transportation of literary themes, elements, characters, story arcs, images, or callbacks to their referents—though sometimes the connections remain more subtle, more nuanced than these overt allusions.

This panel seeks to explore comics’ relationship(s) to the literary works they are inherently connected to by using the theoretical frameworks established by scholars, such as Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders, to seek out the textual connections between comics and traditional literary classics as well as to build and expand upon previous studies of comics adaptation, like Stephen Tabachnick and Esther Bendit Saltzman’s collection Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works and Jason Tondro’s Superheroes of the Round Table: Comics Connections to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

Hutcheon writes that, by calling a work an adaptation, “we openly announce its overt relationship to another work or works” and that an adaptation is “repetition without replication” (A Theory of Adaptation 6,7). By contrast, Sanders defines “appropriation” as a text that “frequently effects a more decisive journey away from the informing text into a wholly new cultural product and domain, often through the actions of interpolation and critique as much as through the movement from one genre to others” (Adaptation and Appropriation 35). By using these definitions as starting points, we can begin to explore how and why different comics adapt or appropriate elements of classic literature to different ends, different means, and different audiences, and why those myriad elements factor into their critical receptions.