Images of the inferno

This is quite possibly the prettiest thing to hit purgatory in ages. Artist and illustrator Seymour Chwast has taken Dante's Divine Comedy and morphed it into an eye-popping graphic novel. Be warned: Chwast's creative adaptation takes the 14-century epic poem in a slightly different direction. Dante is "a pipe-clenching, trench-coated, fedora-clad private eye" and purgatory is depicted as a multi-tiered cake. Heller McAlpin at NPR finds the project "fiendishly entertaining:"

Chwast's enterprise is something else: not an illustrated Divine Comedy, but a graphic novel — his first — based on Dante's Christian allegory. The brilliant founding partner of Push Pin Studios distills the gist of Dante's 100 cantos into bold black-and-white cartoons, translating Dante's lurid otherworldly torments into a twisted, ever-morphing pattern of writhing sinners. Paradise features high-kicking chorus lines of apostles and Esther Williams-like circles of soaring angels, like some sort of manic, celestial Ziegfeld Follies. All this visual shorthand is augmented by minimal first-person narrative and succinct captions adapted from Dante's text in eye-catchingly expressive graphics.  The result is an accessible introduction to The Divine Comedy — a sort of high-end, WHAM-POW Cliff's Notes.