Designer and illustrator Seymour Chwast reinterprets Dante’s DIVINE COMEDY in new graphic novel
Society of Illustrators
138 East 63rd St.
Friday, September 24, $10-$20, 6:30
www.societyillustrators.org
www.pushpininc.com
Longtime commercial designer and illustrator Seymour Chwast enters the world of the graphic novel with his original take on a complex classic, DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY (Bloomsbury, September 2010, $20). Adapted from Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century foray into the nine circles of hell, Chwast’s black-and-white tale follows Dante, depicted as a tall, thin, pipe-smoking noir writer in hat, trenchcoat, and sunglasses, and Virgil, a short, stout, mustached man in dark suit and hat who walks with a cane. As the pair make their way through thirty-three cantos of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, they come upon Captain Charon, who ferries the dead across the River Acheron; souls boiling in tar; an angel that carves peccatums on Dante’s forehead; sinners engulfed in flames; and sowers of discord who are repeatedly stabbed by a devil. Also among the punished are falsifiers of metals, blasphemers, thieves, the unshriven, the avaricious, the gluttons, and the lustful. Chwast’s interpretation of Dante is indeed divine and comic, a playful retelling filled with humor and light horror. Chwast, who is seventy-nine and known as the Left-Handed Designer, will be at the Society of Illustrators on September 24 for a lecture, book launch, and reception celebrating the release of this delightfully devilish hardcover.