REVIEW BY EDGAR ALLAN POE I must confess that as I sat down to read Rosebud Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe (issue 1, 2001), a collection by various artists and illustrators of classic Poe stories and poems, my attention was not undivided. The comic had competition from TV. I was about to turn it off when ABC's latest primetime game show, The Chair, aired. John McEnroe, the most tortured of tennis greats, has found a second career tormenting contestants as they compete for a $250,000 cash prize by answering questions while strapped into a supercharged dental chair that measures their heart rate. To win, contestants must not only answer all questions correctly, but also keep their heartbeats in check while being subjected to the host's awkward jokes designed to unnerve, flames emerging from the floor, balloons popping, and even a live alligator dangling just inches from the floor. face. During the ordeal, contestants are revved like engines, their heart palpitations monitored and displayed like a red-coated tachometer. Whenever the human heart beats too fast, the prize money flows away like blood from an embalmed corpse. How, I wondered, could the humble medium of comics or graphic design classics, with its pen-and-ink sketches in glorious black and white, compete with The Chair, a game show that seems to have sprung from the mind of Poe himself? How, for example, could Rick Geary's capable but unremarkable storyboard of "The Tell-Tale Heart" compete with a show that makes the murmurs of anyone's tell-tale heart visible on screen and throws in "The Pit and the Pendulum" at no extra cost ? “It might not be exactly a fair comparison, but it might be inevitable, and it might even be one of those invited by this new compilation. Graphic Classics finds itself in the surprising position of representing a slightly heavier pop cultural medium, a tool of pop canonization - like a new edition of story collections - while the horror of Poe can be conveyed through the crass vehicle of a game show . . However, since Poe was the theorist of that class of compositions "not to exceed in length what could be read in an hour", it is still entirely appropriate that a medium such as the comic, which has been rightly or wrongly accused of providing the minimum attention span would continue to promote Poe. In his introduction to Graphic Classics, "The East Texas Po' Kid Finds Poe and Hopes You Will Too," Joe R..