The Globe and Mail

Here's how the story goes: Awed by Michelangelo's statue of David, the then-Pope asked the sculptor, “How do you know what to cut away from the stone?”

“It's simple,” Michelangelo said. “I just remove everything that doesn't look like David.”

In other words, he was liberating the figures trapped in stone, a process that can be seen in his suffocatingly great unfinished sculptures of slaves in the Accademia in Florence.

Well, I don't make quite the same claim for greatness for the brilliant American cartoonist R. Sikoryak, but he's doing something similar in his unique vision of comic books. Sikoryak takes great literary classics and imagines them as if they were comic books. And he succeeds brilliantly in this self-proclaimed arena “where classics and cartoons collide,” or what this newspaper has already called “a canny fusion of overlapping fictional legacies.”

In Masterpiece Comics, the indispensable Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly brings together a number of Sikoryak ventures that have already appeared, but over 20 years, and in publications most of you will never have heard of: Monkeysuit, Snake Eyes, Raw.

And it's a great service, because seeing them together convinces that Sikoryak found the comic in the classic, the classic in the comic.

In what is both parody and homage (to the old Classics Illustrated comic books as much as to the classics themselves), he retells the classics in ways that are both funny and, oddly, deep. And sometimes disturbing.

Thus, Hester's Little Pearl is Little Lulu meets Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. The innocent Lulu is Hester Prynne, condemned to bear the scarlet A of the adulteress on her person while hounded by her obsessively judgmental secret husband Roger Chillingworth, here played by the always morally dubious Tubby, in false beard and mad pursuit. The collision of the two brings out all the (im)moral possibilities of the Lulu comics while showing us the comic possibilities of Hawthorne's Puritan America. The cover, a perfect imitation of Little Lulu design, gives us the publisher as Fell comics, a cleverly lapsarian allusion to original publisher Dell.

The longest story is The House-Keeper's Tale, a mash-up of Wuthering Heights and EC comics' Tales from the Crypt, which plumbs the fully horrific depths of Emily Brontë's gothic romance.

There isn't anything here that is less than excellent: Dagwood and a very shapely Blondie (a believable temptress) as Adam and Eve, with a white-suited Mr. Dithers as God; the little comics that came with Bazooka gum are now part of Dante's Inferno bubble gum and can be redeemed for such things as a three-headed dog collar or a road map of Hell; Mary Worth is transformed into Lady Macbeth; Charlie Brown becomes Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis (and if ever a comic-strip character was meant to be turned into an insect, it is surely good ol' Charlie Brown, whose misery and social unease are a match for Samsa's), and so entertainingly on.

For me, the very best of this wonderful collection is Dostoevsky Comics, in which the dark possibilities of Batman (now a standard trope of graphic novels and cinema) are superbly explored. In Crime and Punishment!, he is Raskol, or Raskolnikov, the Nietzschean student who kills an old woman pawnbroker. The thing is, the old woman is ... the Joker. But this is perfect, for how different is the caped crusader, the lone vigilante, from the febrile student who imagines himself above the law.

What makes this collection even more outstanding is Sikoryak's uncanny ability to mimic, in exact detail, the styles of the comics he both loves and mocks. You'd swear his Crime and Punishment is by Bob Kane, or that good ol' Gregor Brown was produced by Charles M. Schulz himself. It's a flawless imitation which at the same time manages to establish its own identity: quite a feat. It leaves me wondering what he'd have done with Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, or Walt Kelly's Pogo.

Definitely a keeper.

Martin Levin is Books editor of The Globe and Mail. He hopes that R. Sikoryak has another 20 years of such mad merriment in him.