Changes

It seems incredibly right, on only the third page of this text, that the Divine Comedy should be transferred to the black and white, cartoonish side of the graphic novel format. Our venturing hero encounters the ''leopard of malice and fraud'', the ''lion of violence and ambition'' and the ''she-wolf of avarice and incontinence'', and leaves bemoaning ''living in a world of symbolism''. You could see the beasts illustrated and captioned by name curving alongside their body, just as Hogarth may have displayed them, but no, Emerson goes down the path that is less cartoonish and less newspaper comic strip, and lets the picture and script stay a bit more separate. But later on he is delving into the more blatant, and immediate, by dressing The Furies up as multiple Maggie Thatchers. The good thing about this book is there is reason for everything in it - from the examples of artwork I have described, to the fact both creators claim it to have been ''influenced by childhood reading of MAD magazine'', and a reason the publisher of this untouchable classic is known as Knockabout Books.

There are also, of course, more madcap sections, forcing through the comical aspects to the work Dante created by featuring well-known and thinly disguised contemporary references. Here they might serve the modern reader less well, so they've been added to in many different ways - I won't need to mention the musical hobby of choice in limbo...