Not With but Instead

Abstract Graphic adaptations of literary works originated in the Golden Age when Albert Kanter first produced comic versions of canonical texts in Classics Illustrated . By mid-century, these adaptations were so widely used in schools that Frederick Wertham disparaged their presence as ‘a serious indictment of American education’. Graphic adaptations remained in secondary schools throughout the twentieth century, but almost always in pedagogical purgatory: deemed less literary than their source texts, used to entice struggling readers, most often read alongside the original, and judged solely by fidelity to their source. These teaching practices linger today, even as graphic adaptations have proliferated and improved in craft, ingenuity, and ambition. This article proposes a new framework for teaching graphic adaptations, moving away from the fidelity standard and positioning them as independent comics.