Classics Illustrated

So, having finally made my way through LAST OF THE MOHICANS (as an unabridged audiobook), I conclude that Mark Twain went easy on J.F.C. in "Cooper's Literary Offenses". All I'd read previously of Cooper, when I was studying for my Master's exams, was THE PRAIRIE, the last of the Natty Bumpo novels, in which he's an eightyish windbag fighting the Sioux out on the prairies. That was an experience I decided I didn't need to repeat anytime soon --- hence the thirty-plus year delay before recently tackling MOHICANS, which did not in any way repay the time spent reading it.


And yet, having said that, I have to admit that there's another Cooper novel I know well, though only in abridged form: THE SPY, a Revolutionary War story about a man despised by his neighbors because everyone thinks is a Tory spy when he's really Washington's most trusted double agent, whose heroic deeds are never known. I know this from the CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED version, which we owned and which I read repeatedly. In retrospect, I think this series was a great venue because it abridged the stories but did not rewrite or recast them for a younger audience (as wd be the case nowadays). So faithful were they that I remember, when I eventually came to read ROMEO & JULIET in its complete version in class  (that wd have been in 9th grade, the last year of junior high), being surprised that one speech I didn't recognize in a scene I remembered well.

I had a pretty good stack of these, perhaps twenty or so, all of which are long since lost -- I loaned them to two friends and never got them back. Jotting down some notes and then looking through the listing of them at wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Comics), I'm surprised by how many of them I remember, and how well I remember specific scenes in them all these years later. At least three I never have re-read in their full, non-comic book versions:

Cooper's THE SPY
Parkman's THE CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC
Norris' THE OCTOPUS

Far more common is for me to have first read a story in its Classics Illustrated version and then later (sometimes quite a bit later -- i. e. one or two only in recent years) having read the original in full:

Shakespeare's ROMEO & JULIET
Melville's MOBY DICK and, I think, TYPEE

Twain's A CONNECTICUT YANKEE

Wells' THE INVISIBLE MAN

THE SONG OF HIAWATHA

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

Kipling's THE JUNGLE BOOK

Wells' THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON 

Wells' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Wells' THE TIME MACHINE

a few were for some reason less memorable: I think I may have read the following, but can't be sure at this point:

Hawthorne's THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES
Mary Shelly's FRANKENSTEIN
JOAN OF ARC
Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS

--JDR.
current reading: ROCANNON'S WORLD (LeGuin)