The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is a poem that has followed me around most of my life. At least that’s the way it feels. When I was a kid I had a Mad magazine adaptation, from which I memorized it. Today I can only recite a few stanzas by heart, but I still remember the Mad illustrations, like the saintly (and husky) Lenore pressing the laundry.

There are no end to the illustrated Poe works now available, with “The Raven” being one of the most popular of his titles to get that treatment. This version, part of the terrific Kids Can Press Visions of Poetry series, has art by Ryan Price, who appeared at a local art gallery when the book came out. At the time I had the chance to buy prints of the illustrations for this book but I didn’t because money was tight and all that.

What a great illustrator does is illustrate the poem or story while at the same time using the pictures to tell another story, not in opposition (though that’s always possible) but in parallel. I think Price does a wonderful job of that here. The pictures really evoke a mood, with the narrator and his Lenore both having vast expanses of forehead that help suggest how mental, how interior, a poem this is. So much of what we see, perhaps everything, is going on inside the narrator’s head. His madness is the result of isolation: both bereft of Lenore and stuck out in his cabin in the woods, and so agoraphobic that the sound of a knock at the door is enough to terrify him. But then, the bird’s footprints are there in the house before he hears the knocking. So why is he so frightened at the gentle tapping? Because he’s already breaking down. It’s not the repetition of “Nevermore” that drives him crazy; that only tips him over the edge.

Details like the bird’s footprints, or the aces and eights left lying on the tabletop, are worth noticing on every page. And there’s a modern horror atmosphere at work too. We are in semi-modern times, for starters, as the cabin has an aerial and a television set. But what’s on TV? Are they playing Night of the Living Dead? It looks like a cemetery on the screen, and we know Romero’s film is in the public domain, from whence it is constantly being pulled and referenced in modern horror films. Then, keeping with this modern motif, there’s the way the narrator starts scribbling graffiti on the walls, and Lenore’s ghostly appearance as a J-horror avatar. I was almost expecting to see her climb out of one of her picture frames, if not the TV.

Another triumph then from this short-lived series. The spelling of “visitor” as “visiter” was the only blemish I registered, and I hope kids who are the age I was when I first read the poem in Mad don’t get the wrong idea from that. But if they commit it to memory and learn to recite it like I did, that typo won’t make a difference.

Graphicalex