Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Classics Illustrated Comics


Now, I get to pay homage to another kind of book that sustained and inspired me in my childhood: the comic book. I read all kinds of comics and was always trading them with my friends. Batman was a favorite, but I kept gravitating to the Classics Illustrated comics. They basically stripped the classics down to their bare bones and revealed that they each had at their heart, a great story worth telling. 

Loved all the Jules Verne stories, and eventually read most of his books, but a particular favorite was "The Mysterious Island" that was a kind of sequel to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" which I also first encountered in comic form and then in the Disney movie that I loved. I was excited when I found out they made a movie of Mysterious Island, and saw it in the theatre when it came out in 1961. I was not disappointed even though they strayed a fair bit from the book and combined it with elements of the H.G. Wells book, The Island of Dr Moreau.

The original Classics Illustrated Comics are now in the public domain and the Internet Archives has a terrific set of them that are free to download in PDF format for anyone who loved them as kids and would like to revisit them:


Lots of other comics free to download at the Internet Archives, such as:






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