SOURCE: "Drawing on the Dark Side," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXIV, No. 10, September 5, 1994, p. 70.

[In the essay below, Plagens and Chang focus on Neon Lit's efforts to transform classic literary texts into graphic novels.]

Comic books have gotten a lot less comic over the years. Today's typical readers—skateboard adolescents and some Gen-Xers—are interested in mesomorphic superheroes and fur-clad warlocks. Now comic books are taking a more serious step away from funny-ha-ha toward funny-peculiar. Neon Lit, an imprint of Avon Books founded by poet Bob Callahan, has just come out with a comic-book version of Paul Auster's sinisterly minimalist novel City of Glass. Comic books—or "graphic novels," as they're called when aimed at readers who aren't kids—have taken on literary fiction before. But those were the pictorial Cliffs Notes called Classics Illustrated. This is the first time the form has tried to interpret serious contemporary literature...