Seymour Chwast: Divine Comedy (Bloomsbury, 9/2010)
What happens when you drop a noir hero into a 14th Century Italian epic? Seymour Chwast’s stylish and intriguing graphic-novel version of Dante‘s Divine Comedy provides an answer. Chwast combines dynamic illustration and easily understandable prose to give the epic a fresh new look and an unlikely appeal for non-academic readers. Those of us uninterested in centuries-old religious poetry will be delighted, but readers familiar with the original will find even more to love.
Chwast’s story closely follows Dante’s original epic, in some respects more than others. His Dante, imagined here as a noir detective, joins guide Virgil to discover the perils of the underworld, the meaning of God’s justice, and, in this case, lots of flappers. The author, now sporting a trenchcoat and smoking an ever-present pipe, regards the horrors of hell with all the hard-boiled eyes of a Dashiell Hammett hero, explaining away punishments with all of the original Dante’s stoic resolve.