For twenty years, the cartoonist R. Sikoryak has been creating parody strips of literary masterpieces, casting familiar cartoon characters in classic roles—Little Lulu as Pearl Prynne, Little Nemo as Dorian Gray, Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa. If you’re like me, and you sometimes like your serious literature with a side of Beavis and Butthead (see Sikoryak’s take on “Waiting for Godot”), you will probably laugh out loud over Masterpiece Comics, a collection of thirteen of these strips, just out from Drawn & Quarterly.

In an interview on the Daily Crosshatch, the artist explains how his most creative choices sprang from the self-imposed constraints of the work: “By keeping as much of the dialogue and plot as possible, you can see how the new character changes your response to the themes and the narrative that already exist. And I think it makes for a funnier and sadder final product, if I just say, ‘I’m not going to do anything different.’”

Funniest and saddest? Action Camus, the Superman of nihilism.

(Images courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.)