Don Juan Meets His Public

Though the medium of a comic strip seems under-justified in your key (why this medium, exactly?), the ?panels? themselves are funny and sharp. A comic strip in fact conveys they newfound jocularity of DJ, as well as its jolting, serial progression. In your hands, too, it seems to approximate the ironic self-posturing of this poet for a mass audience ? his sounding of often clichéd or outmoded positions in service what the narrator (in Canto XV) calls ?mobility.?

Be that as it may, you move deftly through highlights of the story that your publication history tells, capturing moments of it with South Park-like insouciance. The one point that the key makes is a good one: you?re knowingly swiping images to illustrate the proliferation of piracy, an important aspect of DJ?s publication (of course you?re doing so while still crediting your sources, and with the full faith and credit of fair-use behind you). Many of these expropriations are downright funny ? I particularly liked your use of Kubrick?s overheated, cross-the-pond orgy fantasy, as well as Johnny Depp?s mascara?d pirate. Byron and popular culture seem to get along as closely as ever here. Ending with an image of an image of Napoleon ? or, rather, Byron-as-Napoleon ? moves towards a punch line, though you don?t quite clearly deliver one - and we might expect one, given the genre. What happens to history, once put through the comic strip blender?

Your facility with comic illustration is matched here by care in web navigation and attribution. You help your reader move forward and back ? not only between ?panels?, but between the project and parts of your publication history that it?s illustrating. Such care in orientation does much to bring comic-book ease and even reassurance into a more fluid, unfamiliar context.