The Return of Classics Illustrated
“In trying to visualize them, I suddenly understood I didn’t know the full imagery of them. In ‘Eldorado,’ would you believe it, I didn’t understand that in the last illustration of the thing, the knight and his horse will be moldering bones, and the sort of glowing ghost of the two of them will be going up and away. The quest for Eldorado continues on after death and anybody who wants to get there has to keep going. It’s a heck of an image and I never really got it before.”
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“Sure enough, that’s what it means,” said Wilson, “but I didn’t get it until I tried to draw it up.” He’s drawing it up right now, and if the rest of the book is as strong as the cover, which he’s already turned in, it’ll be terrific. “I’ll never make a cartoon or joke of the stuff. I’ll never put a Band-Aid on the beak of the raven. But I might have a picture of the knight looking unhappily at a wino on the sidewalk. Little contemporary touches hither and yon.”
“‘And o’er his heart a shadow / Fell as he found / No spot of ground / That looked like Eldorado,’” said Wilson. “If you had some horrible corner of the city and some guy lying there and a garbage can, it’ll be a good image.”
“I’ll do the whole damn thing. Soup to nuts. It’ll be quite a piece of crafting. If it’s no good it’ll be entirely my fault.”
The key document on Roberts’s cluttered wall is the production schedule with 11 working titles already on it. In addition to Gahan Wilson’s Poe, First’s new line debuts next January with Great Expectations by Rick Geary, Moby Dick by Bill Sienkewicz, and Through the Looking-Glass by Kyle Baker.
But unless we missed it, nobody seriously played the fire as a cultural tragedy. Eight galleries were destroyed! We’re still waiting for a profile of an artist, most likely young, who’s just seen the last two or three years of work go up in smoke. An artist whose show in one of those galleries was his or her big break.
