In 1868, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott was first published. It was a reluctant project from an author more inclined to write short stories about boys, but who, despite these misgivings, managed to deliver a genuine and enduring story of female, domestic life.  Almost one hundred and fifty years later, Little, Brown Books published a graphic novel reimagining of the text: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (2018). Written by Rey Terciero, the pseudonym of DC and Marvel editor Rex Ogle, and illustrated with the smart, deft inclusivity of Bre Indigo, this was an adaptation of Little Women which fully embraced the liberties of twenty-first-century storytelling. It saw the March sisters become a blended family, explored themes of queer identity, and was set in Brooklyn, New York.

Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy was later joined by The Secret Garden on 81st Street (2021), in which Ivy Noelle Weir and Amber Padilla’s artwork reimagined The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911), similarly set in New York, and then by Anne of West Philly (2022). This was a new interpretation of Anne of Green Gables, an early twentieth-century children’s book set on Prince Edward Island, and one which had already spawned a number of sequels of its own. Anne of West Philly, written again by Weir but this time illustrated by Myisha Haynes, familiar elsewhere to comics readers from her work on Gwenpool (2016-2018), sees Anne growing up in West Philadelphia over the course of a year.

These ‘Classic Graphic Remix’ titles offer readers a chance to explore the established texts within children’s literature, to question their relevance for modern-day readers, and to right (or indeed, write) the harms that these texts may perpetuate due to their context of original production. This is no simple ask: classics can be an unforgivable, yielding thing to work with in a modern context, laden with a mythos and meaning that often resonates far beyond the text – and that has done so for many, many years. To represent that in comics, to use line and colour to capture often well-entrenched contexts and discussions, and to offer a new interpretation, a response to these debates, is not straightforward.

Yet there is something exciting in their approach here, something ferociously interesting in how Haynes et al. take their topic seriously and deliver something told with respect and with heart and also told well. Comics require that we face up to the past and represent it in a way that allows its issues to be interrogated and questions to be asked where they have to be asked. Visual storytelling makes the debate immediate, makes it your problem, your solution. And then, to situate this within the context of comics for children is to do something deeply radical. It is easy to disparage the stories we tell for young people, to insist that we all move on from childish things, and yet there is everything here and it is good.

The Secret Garden on 81st Street sets itself in a New York brownstone which holds a long forgotten roof top garden. There are important changes from the original text: not only is Colin the son of two fathers, Archie and Masahiro, but he now suffers from severe anxiety and panic attacks caused by the loss of Masahiro. Parachuted into this family after her own sudden bereavement, Mary must learn not only how to navigate her own grief but also the new world she finds herself within. With thick, rounded lines and rich, heartfelt colour, Padilla makes Mary a figure of purpose, of stubborn and determined vibrancy. She moves throughout her landscape, throughout the city, and, in doing so, she comes to discover herself. Her discovery of the long-forgotten rooftop garden sees her open doors, move towards plants, prick herself on a thorn. Not only is this an exploration of the new world about her, but it’s also a way for her to learn how to feel again. The thorn hurts, the world hurts, but Mary learns that she can manage it.

The ending changes, but also it doesn’t. Weir addresses the entrapment of Mary within the domestic, a problem which has always bothered me in the original, and gives you something deeply heartfelt and smart instead; a twenty-first-century answer to a moment which worked then but doesn’t work now. That’s what comics can do: they make the unsaid apparent by their very nature. Visual storytelling is present, inescapable. A frame explores what happens within but also without. There is a totality of meaning, a wholeness of page, and it’s something which every inch of these books capitalises upon.

Weir’s Anne of West Philly sees Anne Shirley, a talented coder, living in West Philadelphia under the guardianship of siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. Amongst other changes, Anne goes to robotics club rather than Sunday school, the story is set over a single year rather than five, and she cuts her hair rather than dying it in the original. These are deftly done, as is the handling of Anne’s tendency to look on the bright side of things, explained as a result of her painful history of previous fosterings and abandonment issues. Haynes’ artwork brings this all to the fore with open faces, heart-on-their-sleeves characters, and stillness: Anne looks. She witnesses. She takes in the world and understands it. And even those parts of the world, of herself, that she does not understand, she knows that she will soon enough.

That’s what comics do: they let us look, they let us see. They reflect the richness of the world back at us. There’s a clarity at play here, a gentle welcome for the reader and a promise that they will find something of interest here. Consider Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and the warm storytelling of Terciero and the loving art of Indigo. Here, a blended interracial family must learn how to live with each other during the absence of their father, overseas with the military. The joy of the original text has always been its exploration of people, the bonds between family, and that is present here and understood. Yet Terciero is also able to draw something new out of the text and introduce conversations on race, identity, and sexuality; in doing so, there’s new space here, something sparky and interesting and so welcome.

In doing so, in finding this new in the old, in delivering it with colour and heart, these comics remind us that children’s classics are not to be worshipped and left at a distance. That these are stories which served readers then and should serve us now. That if we refer to them as classics, we should question and interrogate the meaning of that label and whether it still stands. That we can respect the shape of the original and understand that while simultaneously working to open it up into something new, something for us now.

And in getting their fingers dirty with the text and finding this newness, Weir, Indigo, Padilla, Terciero, and Haynes remind us that comics are for readers. That nothing really matters in storytelling without the audience being there to finish the panel, and that young readers deserve ur-texts which have relevance for them now. That to retell these classics is to express a love for the original but to also share that love, remade, with new readers. That classics are not precious distant things: they are for us, by us, and should always be with us.

Even if they were originally written for children.

(Especially if).