MOBY DICK Classics Illustrated, 1990

Moby Dick is one of the great, enduring works of American fiction, right up there with To Kill A Mockingbird and The DaVinci Code.* Herman Melville’s powerful story about the doomed ship Pequod’s hunt for a killer white whale is full of dark poetry, supernatural menace, visceral passages of carnage, and let’s face it -- lots and lots of really boring shit about whales. Thank God they made a comic book out of it!

This should be called Moby Dick: The Good Parts, because this comic book adaptation by artist Bill Sienkiewicz and writer D.G. Chichester trims all the whale fat off Melville’s tale and emphasizes the violence and brooding evil. It’s part of the relaunched Classics Illustrated series, which transmogrifies works of literature into comic book form. I had a lot of the original Classics Illustrated books when I was a kid; they served as gateway drugs into the world of hardcore classic fiction for a whole generation of kids, and the 1990’s relaunch of the line adopted the same mission. This Moby Dick comic isn’t designed to comprehensively tell the story; it’s more like a movie trailer for the book itself, enticing you to read the original.

Moby Dick is a beautiful prestige format book printed on glossy paper that enhances Sienkiewicz’s subtle and surreal painted artwork. I have gushed messily all over Bill Sienkiewicz’s artwork before, and I will do it again. He is a ninja master; one of the greatest sequential artists to ever work in comics. There are few comic artists whose work would do justice to Melville’s work, but he’s clearly up to the challenge.

Check out this spooky panel of Captain Ahab in the company of evil spirits, embodiments of his dark lust for vengeance:

As usual, Sienkiewicz mixes medium and techniques to capture the different moods of the story. In some places the art is luminous and overexposed, in other places the art is dark and psychedelic. Regardless of the technique, Sienkiewicz’s art is always put in service of the story.

Writer DG Chichester has the challenging task of distilling Melville’s massive work into a lean read, and for the most part he is successful. He wisely focuses on the bare bones of the plot and throws in a lot of the sinister stuff for flavor. The comic is steeped in superstition and evil, from Ahab’s phantoms to the blasphemous baptism of a harpoon with the blood of whalers to the prophecy of the captain’s fate – because the boring whale stuff is eliminated, the spooky stuff takes a more prominent role in this adaptation.

Moby Dick climaxes in a three-day hunt/battle with the white whale, during which Ahab’s quest to slay Moby Dick drags the crew of The Pequod into mortal peril. The man has a serious hard-on for that whale.

Things do not go well for the whalers, who learn too late that Moby Dick is the wrong whale to screw with. The whale goes ballistic and launches like an ICBM through their longboats in this awesome full-page panel:

I hope I’m not wrecking the story for anybody when I tell you that Captain Ahab and damn near everybody dies at the end of Moby Dick. Screaming defiance to the last, the obsessed whaler is dragged to his death, bound to his prey by his own rope as it descends into the crushing depths.

“To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

I know what you’re thinking: aren’t those Ricardo Montalban’s last lines in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? Yes, and you’re a geek.

Moby Dick: no superheroes, no capes, no boobs, no boring passages about whales. Just a whole lot of spooky foreshadowing and brilliantly depicted carnage, courtesy of Bill Sienkiewicz. If you want your doom served steaming hot on a silver platter with a nice garnish, go hunt this comic down.

*I am totally kidding.