Graphic Canon

The graphic canon does fascinate me, as it must any experienced reader who also has an eye for the aesthetics of art. It could be very helpful to maintain the attention of students who are overwhelmed by viewing a page of text, of students who love to draw and express their ideas in unconventional ways.
However, I would not see this as a silver bullet necessarily, because it still only will present itself as engaging to a certain niche of students. In fact, even for the students who might benefit well from it, I think would be tempted to look at the pictures alone and not bother looking at the text to see if they can get the gist of the story without bothering with it. This tendency, I think, is increased by the fact that the text is sometimes difficult to read, even for me. Since most students are not even being taught how to write in cursive anymore (though I wish that this were not the case, personally), I've seen that many will not even attempt to read anything written in it. This is problematic especially for "The Hill." Also, in the selections where the text is lifted in its original form and put into the text word-for-word, I think students will still struggle to grasp meaning when they're presented with words like "fortnight" in "Pride and Prejudice."
If it were in my power, I would keep the powerful illustrations while maintaining the text in regular line-form below. The text could still be effectively abridged, and it would be almost a compromise between conventional text and this comic-book style, though the setback to this solution is that it might appear to students more like children's books.
I appreciate the diversity of texts that are incorporated here, and I look forward to more variations on this method, as I fully believe that these will inspire many more to take the same approach with their own favorite texts. The creation of something like this by the student would be a perfect way to assess his or her comprehension of the book, however it would of course only be appropriate for students who are talented already at illustrating.
The Graphic Canon would be well-loved by strong readers, and perhaps preferred by weaker-readers, and would be an effective way to share some knowledge of classical literature with the students without having them read the works in full, though no teacher should expect a very deep understanding of the stories from these alone. What it may aid in is the understanding of allusions in other books, and if the situation calls for it, this would be ideal.