Through the Looking-Glass » (Large Prin)

It's possible that if Lewis Carroll had never met Alice Liddell, he might have enjoyed a more peaceful lifetime and an obscure legacy. But his whimsical inventiveness touched everything he did, and a story he made up one afternoon for a little girl became one of literature's great classics, Alice in Wonderland.

Through the Looking Glass is a sequel of sorts to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published seven years after in 1872. Alice, now slightly older, walks through a mirror into the Looking-Glass House and immediately becomes involved in a strange game of chess. Soon, she is exploring the rest of the house, and meets a sequence of characters now familiar to most: Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty, and the Walrus just to name a few.

Publishers Weekly

Classics Illustrated comics returns with this dismal adaptation of Carroll's second Alice tale. Most of the charming paradoxes and silly puns are salvaged in gs the text, arranged in columns beneath the artwork rather than in word balloons. Consequently, a lot of very small illustrations are needed to carry the dialogue between Alice and the many looking-glass characters--to the detriment of the visual appeal of the work. g Baker ( Why I Hate Saturn ) is a good caricaturist, but the drawings often appear perfunctory and the color choicesg flat, garish and awkward. At its best (the Humpty Dumpty scenes), the g sketchy linework seems more appropriate to a realistic narrative, a thriller or a political satire, and the g book lacks throughout the careful design and rendering that a children's classic requires. (Feb.)