The Wild Party
Art Spiegelman says it was the spine of the book of the 1928 poem "The Wild Party" by Joseph Moncure March that intrigued him sufficiently to pull it from the shelves of the used bookstore he was browsing. He was even more impressed by what he read, describing it as a "hard-boiled, jazz-age tragedy told in syncopating rhyming couplets."
Spiegelmans' 75 illustrations running throughout this lengthy poem that tells the story of a debauched and deadly party thrown by a couple of vaudeville performers are appropriately lurid and menacing. $10.20 on Amazon
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The poem is great, but it owes a lot of its recent popularity to the fact that it's out of copyright. Witness the not one but two major musical theatre versions of the story that ran simultaneously on Broadway and Off-Broadway in 2000!
How many other great graphic novels and Broadway musicals are we missing out on because of overstretched copyrights? *pouts*
I am so (unjustifiably) proud of myself, because I found a copy of this in a big pile of slightly battered comics and books at my local Forbidden Planet the other day. It only cost me £1! And it was great. I may read some aloud at the next debutantes dinner party I throw with my mates...