Moby Dick

With three words, "Call me Ishmael," Melville boldly opens his epic novel in the first person. This suits French graphic novelist Chabouté just fine: his Ishmael becomes both sympathizer and adversary to the obsessed Captain Ahab—his foil as well as his conscience. Second billing goes to tattooed harpoonist Queequeg, who agrees to join Ahab's vengeful quest to kill the white whale, despite knowing the risks to the crew. Chabouté balances their extreme behavior by portraying the day-to-day work of carpenters and blacksmiths aboard the ship Pequod. If he reinvents Ishmael a bit, depicting him as a young man craving adventure rather than as a poor farmer who signs away three years of his life—perhaps to die—to seek his fortune on the high seas, it's only to draw readers in. Each of the graphic novel's 30 chapters begins with its own title page, featuring an apt Melville passage. Only the sea captures Chabouté's imagination more than Moby-Dick itself in its overwhelming vastness and as a metaphor for the great unknown. Black-and-white frames rock and sway like the ocean deep, splashing their inky waves the way water might wet the lens of a camera. It's up close and personal—as Melville intended.