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Do not, however, mistake this book for a canon of graphic novels. There is no Maus, Jimbo, or Persopolis included. That is a canon left for future debates.

"I was envisioning the huge, brick-like Norton anthologies of literature," Kick says, "something as epic and sprawling as that, but with the literature in graphic form."

To this end, around 75 percent of The Graphic Canon is newly commissioned material.

"Even though graphic novels have been gaining respect with critics and popularity with readers, there are huge holes as far as classic adaptations are concerned," Kick says. While the quaint Classics Illustrated comics (1941-1971) that digested everything from The Three Musketeers to The Moonstone into sequential paneled stories that eschewed irony or commentary, Kick notes that there has yet to be a book-length adaptation of any of the ancient Greek plays, the very foundations of Western literature.

What else was missing? "There's also no Paradise Lost," Kick says. "There are several full adaptations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, but no Aeneid. The entire Canterbury Tales has yet to be adapted. Even some of Shakespeare's minor plays are M.I.A. There has been no Anna Karenina or War and Peace, nothing from Dostoevsky except for a version of Crime and Punishment transplanted to contemporary Russia. Robert Berry is doing a fantastic job adapting Ulysses and putting it online, but there is no graphic novel of Joyce's masterpiece. Jane Austen and the Brontës have done all right, but there's nothing for George Eliot. There's a French-language adaptation of Candide, but nothing in English. Lyric poetry has been even less well-served, with individual adaptations appearing scattershot over the years."

Kick admirably did his best to fill these gaps with broad criteria for the selections. Any of the towering, undoubtedly canonical works were welcome, from the Bible to Don Quixote to King Lear. Pretty much anything from the ancient Greeks was sought, as well as "Kubla Khan," Pride and Prejudice, Leaves of Grass, and The Great Gatsby. Also wanted were the non-Western masterpieces, "some of the best writings ever produced by the human race, regardless of location," he says, pointing to The Tale of Genji (universally considered the world's first novel and Japan's crowning work of literature). Then there is the Incan play Apu Ollantay, all but ignored in the English-speaking world, even though it's the only surviving play from pre-Columbian Native Americans. "That alone gives it a unique status and a spot of honor," he says.

Beyond the most obvious choices, Kick says, "it still came down to whether the works are regarded as great, whether they've achieved classic status by being continually reprinted, retranslated, anthologized (in the case of shorter works). Whether they're still taught and debated. Whether they continue to inspire new works of art, cultural references, etc."