EDGAR ALLAN POE REVIEW I must confess that as I sat down to read Rosebud Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe (Issue 1, 2001), a compilation by various artists and story illustrators Poe's classics and poems, my attention was not complete. Comics faced competition from television. I was about to turn it off when ABC's latest primetime game show, The Chair, came on. John McEnroe, the most tortured of tennis greats, has found a second career tormenting competitors as they fight for $250,000 in prizes by answering questions while strapped to a supercharged dental chair that measures their heart rate. To win, contestants must not only answer all questions correctly, but also keep their racing hearts in check while being subjected to the host's awkward jokes calculated to disturb, flames emerging from the ground, balloons popping and even to a live alligator suspended a few centimeters from the ground. confront. In this event, competitors rev like engines, their palpitations monitored and displayed like a red-line tachometer. Every time a human heart beats too fast, the prize money flows out like blood from an embalmed corpse. How, I wondered, could the modest medium of comics or graphic classics with its glorious black-and-white pen-and-ink sketches compete with The Chair, a game show that seems to have come out of the spirit of Poe himself? How, for example, could the effective but banal storyboard of Rick Geary's "The Tell-Tale Heart" compete with a series that makes the whispers of everyone's tell-tale heart visible on screen and adds "The Pit and the Pendulum " at no additional cost. “It may not exactly be a fair comparison, but it may be inevitable, and it may also be the one invited by this new compilation. Graphic Classics finds itself in the surprising position of being a representative of a slightly heavier pop cultural medium, an instrument of pop canonization - like a new edition of collected stories - while Poe's horror can be conveyed through the cruder vehicle of a game show. . However, as Poe was the arch-theorist of this class of compositions "not to exceed in length what could be read in an hour", it is entirely appropriate that a medium such as comics, which been rightly or wrongly accused of catering to a minimum attention span would continue to promote Poe. In his introduction to Graphic Classics, "The East Texas Po' Kid Finds Poe and Hopes You Too", Joe R..