The Graphic Canon of Crime & Mystery Vol 2

Here are Teddy Goldenberg’s dense, murky treatment of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Road Home,” often considered the first hard-boiled detective story ever published. Shawn Cheng renders the first serial-killer story, the so-called fairy tale “Bluebeard” by Charles Perrault. Landis Blair reimagines The Trial as a choose-your-own-adventure story that you cannot win. Plus twenty-three other contributors using a wide range of illustrative styles.

As with previous volumes in the Graphic Canon series, the illustrations run the full gamut of media and techniques, and artistic interpretations range from verbatim literalism to metaphorical extensions to surrealism and abstraction. The common theme, tracing the origins and standout texts of the morbid and mysterious, unites these multifarious partners in crime.

RUSS KICK is the originator of the Graphic Canon series, for which he has commissioned new work from over three hundred artists, now going into its sixth volume. The New York Times selected The Graphic Canon Volume 1 as an Editor’s Choice, and School Library Journal has called the series “startlingly brilliant.” Kick’s nonfiction anthologies, including You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, informed a whole generation of Americans about the hard truths of American politics. He created a media frenzy for being the first to publish suppressed photographs of American flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. The New York Times dubbed Kick “an information archaeologist,” Details magazine described him as “a Renaissance man,” and Utne Reader named him one of its “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” His popular website AltGov2.org is active again and getting national media coverage for archiving documents that the Trump Administration has been deleting.