Because I currently live some two hours from the nearest comic book store in Tucson, this year's Free Comic Book Day proved a pretty spare occasion for me. The only title I was privy to was a sampler sent by Tom Pomplun, editor and publisher of the Graphic Classics series. A 64-page set of black-and-white graphic adaptations, the floppy contains works by Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Shelley. Like the larger trade paperback collections that the sampler serves to promote, the collection works to demonstrate just how difficult a good comic adaptation of "classic" literature can be. Too tight an allegiance to the original written work, and you don't have comics, but an illustrated Reader's Digest abridgement, yet wander too far from the material and you run the risk of losing the writer's voice.

The five works included in the FCBD set display the varying success even good solid professional writers and artists can achieve in this arena. The sampler opens with a cover story adaptation of Poe's "The Black Cat" written by Rod Lott and illustrated by Gerry Alanguilan. Told in first person by its murderer/madman, it's a tempting story to overwrite, but Lott proves sparing with his narration, letting his artist carry the big shock scenes. (There's a half-page panel of our wild-eyed protagonist strangling his wife that looks like it could have come off the cover of EC's Shock Supenstories.) The results effectively capture Poe's words and story without being overly beholden to the former.

On the other side, however, rests Antonella Caputo and Anne Timmons' adaptation of Mary Shelley's romance "The Dream," which is so stuffed with the original work's florid narration that it overwhelms the comic. Timmons' art sweetly captures the air of 19th century romance (in more than one panel it reminds me of a more detailed Trina Robbins), but Caputo's unrestrained reliance on boxed narration ultimately proves too much.

Alex Burrows and Simon Ganes' adaptation of Conan Doyle's "John Barrington Cowles" rests somewhere in between the Poe and Shelley tales. Though Burrows relies heavily on Doyle's own words, he knows when to let a simple silent panel suffice. I wasn't familiar with Doyle's tale of a literally mesmerizing young woman, but the Graphic Classics made me want to track it down. A big key to this 'un lies in Ganes' stylized art, which at times reminds me of Alex Nino. It neatly captures its sadistic heroine in all her seductively whip-wielding glory, even if the comic's ending comes across curiously flat.