Aesop's College

by Phil Adamo, Watercolorcirp (Illustrator)

In AESOP’S COLLEGE, the professors are dogs, the students are cats, and the provost is a pot-belly pig. When a classroom incident sparks campus-wide unrest, the animals must debate the merits of academic freedom over community standards. It’s Plato’s Apology meets Animal Farm — an academic satire for the era of the “coddled American mind.”

136 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 15, 2023

Reviews

[Cheri Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read a wonderful graphic-novel version of Animal Farm: The Graphic Novel; Adamo follows in this vein in Aesop's College by including really superb illustrations by Watercolorcirp, an illustrator living in Romania. The collaboration is particularly effective when Watercolorcirp brings to life Adamo's highly imaginative descriptions of how his animal characters, evolved to the point at which they can occupy human offices and fulfill the duties of academic appointments, deal with their cloven hooves and lack of opposable thumbs when faced with all the trappings of humanity: desks, phones, wheeled chairs, and the like. In the face of a growing nationwide awareness that students whose communities have been historically marginalized from the college experience are often forced to walk an uneasy line between their desire to learn & and their need to assert their humanity in an environment that does not always value it, Adamo's novel makes an argument in favor of the academic freedom of professors who want to push and challenge their students.