After reading and being wowed by 'The Building' a year and change ago, I've been ready to read a lot more books by Will Eisner, both before and after he coined the term "graphic novel". It turns out that I had one on the shelf, so I pulled that down and diced into 'The Last Knight'.

While 'The Building' was an original work, this is one of a series of "light-hearted adaptations" of classic literature, here 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes, which has been considered the first "modern novel" and one of the bestselling novels of all time. Some have placed it at the very top of that tree but they didn't have reliable figures back in 1605, so it's hard to come up with close to accurate numbers. Let's suffice to say that it's one of the most important and most read books of all time and yet it remains obscure to the modern generations. I, for one, haven't read it.

As such, I have no idea how effective Will Eisner is at not only adapting a classic of world literature to the format of a graphic novel but also at condensing a book (technically two books) that rack up over a thousand pages of prose into a mere thirty-two pages of admittedly large format hardback. What I can say is that reading this book and comparing it to the little I know of 'Don Quixote' from pop culture and general knowledge and checking out its Wikipedia page, he seems to have nailed the essentials.

It's about a man called Alanzo Quijano, who is a devoted reader of the sort of romances of chivalry that dominated the world of literature before the release of 'Don Quixote'. However, he's read so many of them that he loses his grip on reality and believes himself to be a knight-errant with a mission to restore chivalry to the world; which he promptly attempts to do in a set of episodic and hilarious encounters. 'Knighthood shall no longer be kept imprisoned in books!" he proclaims and hauls out his grandfather's armour to polish.

As such, Eisner draws him as clearly off. He's completely functional but I could be reading this in a different language I don't speak and it would be abundantly clear that Alonzo is not firing on all cylinders. Of course, we can also see what he can't, which plays into that. His trusty steed is an old workhorse. The castle he visits is the local inn. He kneels down so the innkeeper can knight him. I might even suggest that this could be entirely absent text and I'd still be able to tell what's going on without any trouble. All I'd miss are the names.

So he saves a tormented victim, finds a lady love and fights brigands, three events that Cervantes no doubt dedicated long chapters to, but Eisner condenses them down to five pages total. That's a serious compression ratio but the point is clear and the message of the book likewise. At this pace, it doesn't take long before he's tilting at windmills believing them to be dragons, in what is surely the most famous episode in all of 'Don Quixote'. That's done and dusted in only five panels across a two page spread.

One of the joys of 'Don Quixote', as I understand it, is that it isn't just the story of Alanzo Quijano, who becomes Don Quixote. It's also the story of Sancho Panza, who becomes his trusted squire. In the beginning, Panza is under no illusions about his master being batshit crazy. He's the grounded companion who can clean up whatever messes Don Quixote creates. However, the longer they stay together and the more adventures they run through, the more Quijano's romantic nature rubs off on him. Chivalry would appear to be catching.

What's especially priceless about this relationship is that these two characters are on completely different story arcs, even as they travel together and encounter everything as one. Don Quixote is mad but his madness eventually fades and he drifts back into being merely Alanzo Quijano again, back in reality. However, while he's doing that, Panza is getting more and more comfortable with his master's romantic fantasies and adopts them as his own. So, after his master eventually dies, Panza is the one to memorialise him, growing old and telling everyone about how he once served Don Quixote, a noble knight who had such grand adventures.

For Eisner to get all this across in only thirty pages, if we exclude the title page and the copyright page after it, is pretty astounding. His art is in colour here, except for moments in black and white when Sancho Panza is old and thinking back, and it's bright and vivid. He had the cartoonist's skill of condensing complex movement into simple strokes and losing none of their power or meaning. In a way, that's what he did with the story itself, so this artistic style fits it naturally. Given that, it seems entirely appropriate to be so short, even if that feels like the most obvious negative to me. I know there were other adventures for Don Quixote.

All in all, this was a lot of fun, but it's a very quick read indeed and I wanted to keep reading when the pages ran out. 'The Building' resonated with me much more, but this isn't really telling a tale, it's serving as the introduction to one. The point is surely to catch the attention of readers in our world where all fiction older than me is considered to be told in difficult language and show us in quick and effective fashion how universal this story is. It's earthy, it's vibrant and it's hilarious. It carries the message that, fundamentally, 'Don Quixote' is something we'd enjoy, and maybe that eleven hundred page behemoth published by Penguin Classics is something we ought to dive into. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Will Eisner click here