R. Sikoryak first came to the attention of comics readers in the pages of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW Magazine. His dead-on recreations of historical cartooning styles—utilized to adapt canonical Western literature—were immediately striking as witty, smart, and intensely well-crafted manifestations of the postmodern impulse within the comics form. His work—featuring Charlie Brown as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, Batman as Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Little Nemo as Wilde’s Dorian Gray—has appeared in various books and anthologies over the past twenty years. Each piece maps the themes and plot elements of “high” literature against the character types, stylistic tics, and formal tropes of “low” popular comics to engineer thematic resonances that mark this compulsively re-readable work as more than just parody or gag. Many of the publications in which Sikoryak’s comics originally appeared are now out of print, but Drawn and Quarterly has finally collected this body of work as a hardcover volume titled, of course, Masterpiece Comics.
Sikoryak grew up in New Jersey, where he and his brothers devoured Marvel comics and daily newspaper strips. “I was an avid reader of all of them,” he recalled. “I never really knew what Mark Trail was on the trail of, but Peanuts was certainly a hugely loved strip of mine.” The brothers also drew: “We actually did a whole series of parody comics as we were growing up. I was doing sort of my version of daily comic strips. I wasn’t producing them every day, but I was doing four panel gag cartoons.”
By the time he entered Parsons art school in 1983, Sikoryak had become excited by the burgeoning wave of post-underground comics, including American Splendor, Love and Rockets, and RAW. He began aggressively experimenting with different art media and visual styles while exploring the history of modern and conceptual art. “I was gravitating toward people who came out of Dada and Pop Art,” Sikoryak said. “I think I went into college thinking I would be a commercial artist of some sort, and I got more and more sucked into the more artistic, poverty-ridden but exciting world of Postmodernism.”
At Parsons, Steven Guarnaccia introduced Sikoryak to Mouly and Spiegelman, and the young artist began working as an assistant on RAW magazine. He sat in on Spiegelman’s comics classes at the School of Visual Arts, where he also took a class taught by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden. For that class, Sikoryak produced his first pastiche strip, inspired by the work of avant-garde composer John Cage. “He has this piece called Indeterminacy, in which tells these short anecdotes about his life,” Sikoryak explained, “and I took maybe ten of the anecdotes that he told and converted them into comic strips. Originally when I conceived it I knew each strip would be in a different style, and I was sort of doing a pastiche of a ‘funny animal’ strip, or a pastiche of an action-adventure strip. And Mark and Paul essentially said, ‘Well, just do specific ones.’”
That suggestion prompted Sikoryak toward the stylistic strategy that he pursues to this day. “I realized then, which has been an important lesson for me, that my work can get very, very squishy if I’m not really adamant about setting the parameters for the style,” he said. “So when I was just sort of doing ‘a’ kind of funny animal story, it looked a lot like my drawing. It didn’t look individual enough. I know it’s funny for me to say ‘individual.’ It’s another individual, but it’s still some individual style. So once I sort of said, ‘OK, the funny animal story will be Pogo,’ for instance, then that galvanizes the look. And I find that when I can actually focus in on one particular style it certainly makes the work more vivid for me.”
Sikoryak pursued this discovery when invited to contribute a page to the first issue of RAW’s second volume in 1991. At the time he had also been freelancing for the Topps company. Using Cage’s technique of working with found materials, he married the visual style and cadences of Bazooka Joe bubble gum comics to the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno, expressing each chapter’s moral as a highly condensed punch line. Forthe next RAW he drew “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown,” an adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis presented as a series of Peanuts strips. That piece in particular impresses with its exact recreation of Charles Schulz’s nearly inimitable style. Sikoryak’s premise also convincingly amplified that well-loved comic strip’s subtextual anxiety—years before it became customary to highlight the downbeat side of Schulz’s work.
“It slowly dawned on that this was something I could definitely go back to,” he said. “And once I did a couple, I think it was Art who said, ‘If you did eighty of these, you could have a book.’ And I thought, ‘I guess I could.’ If only I could have had eighty,” he laughed. “But they certainly got longer as I went along.” The longest pieces in Masterpiece Comics mimic mid-century comic book work by Jack Davis, Dick Sprang, and John Stanley and Irving Tripp, alongside shorter evocations of comic strip work by artists including Chic Young, Tom Wilson and Jon Davis.
Sikoryak goes to great lengths to faithfully recreate not just the visual style of these pre-existing works, but also their particular dimensions, panel compositions, page layouts, and text/image ratios. To achieve his striking recreations he uses much reference. “I photocopy a lot of the strips that I work with, and I cut out figures and panels and I paste them into binders arranged by close-up, long shot, specific characters, specific compositions, landscapes, certain props I might need. So I kind of compile a morgue that I can use as reference as I’m slowly building the specific panels.” But Sikoryak is quick to point out that “all of the strips in the book exist on paper. They’re all drawn by hand. And if you look at my work and compare them to the comics, you’ll see that I’ve been very diligent about getting the details right.”
Masterpiece Comics compiles all of Sikoryak’s comics adaptations of canonical Western literature, including a new continuation of his Wuthering Heights, presented here as an E.C.-style horror comic. Arranged in the order that the book’s literary sources were first published, Sikoryak’s book suggests the changing concerns of Western literature, from the religious and moral lessons of Genesis to Samuel Beckett’s portrait of an absurd universe. Produced over twenty years, this work is collected at a time when the traditional places of both comics and literature have shifted dramatically within American culture.
“Certainly when I started this, the idea was I’m taking strips that are popular in newspapers, in bubblegum wrappers, and sort of chiding the reader into suggesting that they are just as valid as the great works of the canon of Western literature. And at this point, librarians are happy to have anybody read anything,” he observed. “So it’s totally different. I somehow feel like my mission has been inverted. I’m now at the point where I’m trying to convince people to read the classics, because all they read are comics books,” Sikoryak laughed. “That’s not true, I mostly read comics, except when I have to figure out what the next one of these is. It’s just a different world. Perceptions of what is high or low, I don’t think those even really exist in the same way.”
Sikoryak is currently working on a piece for the next issue of Glenn Head’s anthology Hotwired. “It’s called ‘The Menace of Denmark,’” he said, “but I’ll let you put the pieces together.”
