The UK newspaper The Guardian occasionally requests writers to compile Top 10 lists -- best travel books, best Bond villains, bests books on or about boredom, that sort of thing.
The lastest in the series is by Danny Fingeroth, a creator of and expert on graphic novels. And his Top 10 list of favorite graphic novels includes one by Tulsa's own (and the Tulsa World's own) James Vance.
"Kings in Disguise," a tale of a young man struggling to through the Great Depression that Vance created with artist Dan Burr, is No. 7 on the list.
Fingeroth said his criteria for the list was to choose, "the crème de la crème, the graphic novels that I most enjoyed. These are graphic novels, some famous, some less well-known, that do what all great literature does, in that they give you such a pleasurable experience while reading that you're simultaneously eager to uncover the ending, yet also dreading it, knowing that the experience will then be over."
Of "Kings in Disguise," he wrote that it "is one of the saddest graphic novels ever produced, although one not without undercurrents of hope," and compares it with
the movie version of "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Huckleberry Finn."
Read the complete list here:
Read the story: Top 10 Graphic Novels
Vance and Burr created "Kings in Disguise" as a six-issue comic in 1988. A portion of it was later adapted into a radio drama that was broadcast on KWGS.
The complete novel has been published as a trade paperback, first in 1990, then by W.W. Norton in 2006.
It's available via Amazon:
Read the story: Kings in Disguise
