Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

One of the happiest arrivals in my mail has been the third volume of the graphic canon.

It's edited by Russ Kick, and it takes us from Heart of Darkness

to Hemingway to Infinite Jest. Tell me, Russ, how did you go about assembling these volumes?

Well, I started by approaching artists that I already knew or who were my favorite artists and just telling them about the project, you know, that we wanted to adapt the great works of literature graphically.

It could be sequential comics. It could be a series of full page illustrations.

It could be some unusual hybrids, whatever they wanted to try,

as long as they stayed true to the plot and characters of the work. And after that,

I started branching out, finding other artists, and always looking for unknown artists,

because there's just an amazing amount of talent out there.

So there are a lot of artists who their first real publication is in one of these volumes.

Wow. Can you tell me what is an unknown artist? Unknown to who?

You know, their community themselves?

Well, I don't know it yeah about

themselves you'd have to ask each one individually but yeah as far as not just

not being published in in anthologies or having graphic novels of their own

...