Well fancy meeting her here.

Checking this book in the other day, I thought I recognized the lady on the cover...or, at least, the style of the artist who drew here. Flipping through the pages, I became even more convinced that I knew who drew the lady on the cover, and all the people (and plants and animals) that appear in the illustrations throughout the book.

The "Illustrations By" credit on the title page confirmed it: This artist wasn't just someone who drew an awful lot like Colleen Coover, it was Colleen Coover.

So should you find yourself wanting to see more Coover art, and your needs haven't been entirely met by all of her comics output (Bandette being maybe the best place to start) or all of that available on her website, you can always check out The Anxious Gardener's Book of Answers by Teri Dunn Chace for tons of black and white Coover drawings of various gardeners in the act of gardening.

Another Mothman

This illustration of Mothman comes from Linda S. Godfrey's book American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends, and Sightings in America (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin; 2014). I scrutinized every corner of the book to see who the artist who provided the illustrations-which appear at the beginning of every chapter and thus give form to so many of the monsters mentioned within—but couldn't find a credit for the illustrator, who signed his or her work, but whose signature isn't quite legible. I then wondered if Godfrey herself provided the illustrations, and the signature does indeed seem to say Linda S. Godfrey, when one reads it with that in mind. So I'm 98% sure that the above is Godfrey's own drawing of the Mothman (I wish I knew Godfre illustrated the book herself while I was reading it, as I think that may have made me look a bit closer at the pictures).

How does her Mothman rate? Well, at first glance, it's obviously a rather silly-looking Mothman, much more "man" than anything else. He is apparently wearing some form of clothes, and what appears to be a bag over his head. The tight-fitting outfit, mask and posture made me thing most immediately of a professional wrestler, which gave the image a great deal of charm. Her Mothman has quite a bit of detail visible, including a few details that seem original to Godfrey's illustration—that is, not taken from any sighting literature—including the long, claw-like nails on the creature's five-fingered hands and five-toed feet. Actually, the existence of toes of any kind is something I don't recall ever being reported on at all.

Regardless, I think the image Godfrey provides could work as an illustration of the creature responsible for the sightings. Imagine that particular creature there in a very, very dark setting, so that all one could see was his silhouette. Now imagine his arms by his sides, and his wings folded closer to his body, so that the outline of the wings would absorb all the other details—what you'd be left with is the basic, heart-shaped black shape with red eyes seemingly coming from somewhere between its broad shoulders, and the mere suggestion of legs.

As well-lit as he appears in this drawing, that doesn't seem to be a very convincing Mothman, but in a darker environment, it works. And, as always, it's fascinating to see the different ways artists render this most mysterious character. Godfrey's take is definitely among the more unique ones we've seen so far.

Did you know that Batman is so insecure about not having any superpowers...

...that he apparently labels his 45-pound weights as 500-pound weights, in order to trick children into thinking he's got the super-strength necessary to lift 2,000 pounds over his head?

That's the impression I get from this image, from the Ethen Beavers-drawn, Bill Wrecks-written DC Super Friends: Batman Little Golden Book. I recently picked up both it and its companion book Superman by the same team, and they are gorgeous-looking. The story's are no great shakes—I'd recommend Ralph Consentino's picture books about these two heroes over these Little Golden Books—but the artwork is pretty superb, and Beavers makes me like the big-foot Super Friends designs more than just about any other artist I've seen tackle them (excepting only J. Bone, I think).

Review: It Came From Ohio...

They Came From Ohio... might have made for a more accurate title, as writer James Renner's book contains 13 stories of monsters, UFO encounters and similar strangeness from my home state (and, incidentally, would have differentiated it from the R.L. Stine biography with the same title), but then, It Came From Ohio... is a better, snappier-sounding title, and the pronoun could be referring to the book itself, not the stories the book contains, or the creatures and characters that are featured in each of them.

Let's start at the beginning. No, let's start before the beginning, with the cover.

It Came From Ohio...: True Tales of the Weird, Wild, And Unexplained (Gray and Company; 2012) is a very attractive little book. It's a slim volume, just over 100 pages, and higher than it is wide—a thin rectangle of a book that could almost but not quite fit in one's back pocket, or inside coat pocket, like a guide book might.

The almost bright black of the cover sharply contrasts with the green of the title and the figure in the middle, a green which just as sharply contrasts with the sickly yellow of the image's background and the author's name. A few bits of red in the creature's eyes and the beam of light seeming to shoot from its finger draw the eye and add an additional level of complexity.

The cryptozoologically inclined among you, those with an at least passing interest in Ohio's many, many monsters, or readers of this blog with a photographic memory will probably recognize the creature as The Loveland Frog.

The image is by artist Todd Jakubisin, who provides an illustration for each chapter of the book (which we'll look at some more examples of below). Each chapter opens with an illustration facing it, all in roughly the same shape and proportions, and in stark black and white; the cover image is taken from the third chapter, "The Ballad of The Loveland Frog."

There's a block-like simplicity to Jakubisin's illustrations, all of which strive to capture essential elements of the stories, but to present them in ways that are decorative and evocative more than representational. That cover image, for example, isn't a drawing of what the witnesses described seeing so much as it's a cool drawing of a frog-like bipedal creature.

In addition to the Loveland Frogs, other famous Ohio monsters who have their stories told here include the Lake Erie monster AKA South Bay Bessie, the Melon Heads of Kirtland (the next city over from where I currently work and reside, though I'm not brave enough to walk around the woods with a flashlight at night), The Mothman (whom we share with West Virginia; although Point Pleasant, WV is his/its home, the Silver Bridge terminated in Ohio, and there were plenty of sightings of it on our side of the river), and, of course, the omnipresent Bigfoot (The hairy humanoid discussed in the chapter "Bigfoot's Lair" is in Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County).

The other monsters included were new to me. That, or else ones I had read about previously and forgotten having done so.

There's a werewolf from Defiance said to have used a two-by-four or club on a few victims (What's scarier than a werewolf? A werewolf with a two-by-four. Funny how if you add the words "with a two-by-four" to the name of just about anything capable of holding a two-by-four, it becomes scarier. Try it.)

There's a camp ghost nicknamed "Red Eyes," a name it shares with one of the state's many famous Bigfoots.

And then there's a ghost in a house near the university of Akron. (I've read quite a few books on ghosts in Ohio, but few of the stories really stuck with me, as I'm not terribly interested in ghosts; certainly not as much as I'm interested in monsters).

Two pretty famous UFO incidents are included, the 1966 incident in which police officers chased a relatively low-flying, slow-moving UFO along highways for the better part of a night, producing detailed sightings from multiple police officers (This is an incident written about extensively in Jerome Clark's UFO encyclopedia, a book I'd recommend if you're at all interested in the subject), and another particularly credible sighting involving a helicopter full of military men, flying back and forth between Cleveland and Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton (which Clark also covered).

The remaining stories are more along the lines of general weirdness: A chapter on the Toynbee tiles found around the region, the "WOW" signal from space that an Ohio State University professor temporarily picked up and lost and the goings-on of mysterious and super-exclusive rich-person Lake Erie hangout Rattlesnake Island.

Depending on how many other similar books one has read before, Renner's book is either full of quite interesting stories, or a pleasant enough re-telling of some familiar ones (Six of the 13 were new to me). The chapters are all very short, no more than 10 pages at the longest, and thus there's not a whole lot of room for detail. That makes it something like a Weird Ohio 101, introductions to various incidents and creatures one can read more about elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Renner's book doesn't include any notes or even a bibliography, so it doesn't really function as a stepping stone, so much as it might send one seeking a stepping stone. As someone interested in Ohio's monster populace, for example, I very much would like to learn more about the two-by-four toting werewolf of Defiance, Ohio, but I wasn't given anywhere else to look for. Nor can I check his sources for various bits of the Mothman story that seem to contradict other tellings.

(I was interested and confused, for example, by a sentence reading, "Others say the Mothman was an ancient harbinger of doom, the kind seen by prophets in the Old Testament." I don't recall any thing in the Old Testament at all resembling the weird-ass Mothman, and a Bible passage from the Book of Daniel quoted in sidebar in is prefaced by the vague "Some have noted the similarities between a biblical beast...and the Mothman", quoting the following line from Daniel: "After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon its back four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads." Doesn't sound much of anything like the two-winged, headless, owlman-like Mothman, does it?)

Also, I would kind of like to learn more about this crazy paragraph:

Renner is the first to suggest, at least in my reading, that the Coyne Incident (the UFO sighting by the guys in the helicopter) might have been the result of the government testing some sort of psy-op on their own men.

There seems to be a bit of first-hand reporting involved in some of the stories though, even if there are a few cases of sources simply being identified as "Some" or "Others."

In his chapter on the 1966 UFO chase, for example, Renner talks to the son of one of the officers involved in the chase, and reveals some crazy, spooky details about the man's death.

And in the chapter on Mothman, Renner quotes Hazel DeWitt, who appeared in the documentary Eyes of the Mothman, who now serves a Mothman burger in Point Pleasant's Harris Steak House (It's an eight-dollar "charbroiled patty covered in pepperjack and Mothman sauce, whatever that might be.") It's weird how scary the Mothman sightings were in the context of John Keel's original Mothman Prophecies book were, and how silly they seem now that the town has embraced Mothman as a tourist attraction—how credible is a Mothman sighting coming form a lady selling you a Mothman burger, for example, or a tale of a visit from a Man In Black from someone working at the Mothman Museum?

Perhaps the most intriguing stories Renner shares, however, are personal ones, given in the short introduction in which he discusses his fascination with such weirdness. One is about a childhood experience in which he and his friend encounter some weird aerial phenomena and some strange animal or insect life (an incident that takes place at Camp Manatoc, home to the Red Eyes discussed in one of the chapters), and then there's this:

My aunt tells the story—I kid you not—of seeing the Easter bunny in the furry flesh as a child. She has become convinced over the years that what she actually saw was an angel pretending to be the Easter bunny to please her child mind.

That's a story I'd really, really like to hear more of—how big was the Easter bunny? How humanoid and how rabbit like? Was it walking upright? Carrying a basket? (My mom once saw Santa Claus' sleight through her window as a child on Christmas Eve, but only from afar).

Despite some disappointments, mostly of a nature that are particular only to me or someone at least mildly obsessed with some of these subjects, I found the book to be a lot of fun, and a good starting point for explorations on a few interesting topics (And, at $7.99 it's extremely affordable—less than the cost of two issue of The Avengers!)

*******************

Let's take a look at a couple of Jakubisin's illustrations, shall we? I'm just going to limit them to three, but if you're as interested in how different artists choose to depict the same subjects, it's probably worth flipping through one of these to see how he decided to draw, say, the Lake Erie monster.

First, here's his Bigfoot:

Note the posture and the walk, and how it looks a bit like his own, skinny, almost Muppet-like version of Bigfoot loping Patterson-Gimlin style through the woods.

There's a little sidebar in that chapter in which Renner writes that the Patterson-Gilmin film "remains the best evidence for the existence of Bigfoot." I don't know, is that true? If so, Bigfoot is totally not a real living, breathing animal because I'm on the "Dude, That Shit Is Fake As All Get-Out" side of that particular debate.

There's a nice quote about Bigfoot hunting from an Ohio expert and hunter Don Keating about the best way to go Bigfooting: "Don't go out there trying to find Bigfoot hiding behind a tree...Go out and enjoy nature. And if you see it, consider yourself lucky."

Sounds like good advice.

Here is Jakubisin's drawing for the Melonheads chapter, "Dr. Kroh's Home For Peculiar Children":

Rather than drawing a live Melonhead, feral macroencephalic children, Jakubisin draws the aftermath of one of their possible origin stories, in which the home they were living in burned down, leaving only their skeletons for him to draw in the front yard of the burning home.

And as The Mothman is such a repeated subject of interest here at EDILW, I would be remiss if my mission of collection Mothman depictions if I did not include Jakubisin's illustration for the Mothman chapter, "The Mothman Cometh":

Unfortunately, he doesn't offer a depiction of the Mothman, but instead focuses on the beginning of the Neil Partridege sighting, in which his dog Bandit chases a pair of giant red eyes that shine like bicycle reflectors and then disappears.

He distills the scene into a single, circular image, with parallel beams of light framing Partridge and Bandit. But there's no Mothman, which kinda boggles my mind, given how much fun Mothman is to draw.

*******************

Speaking of Mothman, Partridge and Bandit, here's my version of the story, as presented in my The Mothman Comics mini-comic which is, of course, still available for purchase:

I know I shouldn't laugh at the misfortune of others...

...even those who are long-extinct, but I found the cover image of Dinosaur Art: The World's Greatest Paleoart hilarious. It's that WoahHeyHolyShitAAAA!!! face on that Tyrannosaurus Rex, its stumbling half-jump, half-faint and the pratfall-like set-up of the piece; the implication that the split-second before that image, the T-Rex was all walking along the water's edge, thinking he's the invincible top of the food chain and, next thing you know, "Aaa! Where that giant fucking crocodile come from?!"

Oh, it's a pretty nice painting, too.

I borrowed it from the library on the strength of the cover image, and tried really hard to read the book, but it was crazy wonky; in addition to a collection of great "paleoart," it consists of Q-and-A interviews with the artists, and these are all artists/scientists, and they talk like it. I'm familiar enough with art that I can kinda sorta follow discussions of that end of things, but my casual interest in dinosaurs was no match for the science talked about here.

The only part that really grabbed me was the introduction, a brief history of the evolution of paleoart, and the transition of human understanding of dinosaurs as huge, dumb, slow-moving, cold-blooded, swamp-dwelling reptiles to the dynamically varied, agile, probably warm-blooded class of creatures we now consider them to have been.

I would love to read an entire book on that particular aspect of dinosaurs—a sort of cultural history of popular cultural conception of dinosaurs and how it has changed over the decades in science and fiction and film and art(centuries, I suppose, although a few centuries ago we didn't really know what dinosaurs were, despite seeing their bones and suchlike). Someone should really get on that.

In the mean time: Ha ha, look at that Tyrannosaurus Rex about to get eaten! Hee hee hee! Tyrannosaurus Rexs are the funniest.

Another Mothman.

America's Very Own Monsters is a 1982 illustrated prose non-fiction book for young readers. It runs just 48 pages, devoting a few pages each to ten folkloric monsters who live, or whose stories are set, in the United States.

Mothman is, of course, one of these ten, and you can see artist Tom Huffman's depiction of him on the cover; that's him in the middle. Huffman's black and white art is quite moody, and fits the tone of the book quite well. Writer Daniel Cohen doesn't write much about each beast—he can't, really, given the audience and the small amount of space he has to work with—but Huffman tells a bit of their stories through his artwork, and, more importantly suggests possible stories for the creatures to star in, giving young readers enough clues to let their imaginations run wild with them.

I loved the artwork as an adult; I would have been fascinated and terrified by it as a child.

Each of Cohen's chapters is made up of short, topical paragraphs devoted to the highlights of each monster story's body of lore, told in short, declarative sentences.

The "Mothman" chapter, for example, begins like this:

Point Pleasant is a small town in West Virginia. Something scared a lot of people there. The "something" was about six feet tall. It looked like a man. But it had huge wings. It coulf fly at 100 miles an hour.

People called it Mothman.

Cohen goes on to tell the story of the initial 1966 Scarberry/Mallette sighting and the dramatic Wamsley sighting at the Thomas house, in which the Mothman climbed onto the porch and peered through the window, but only vaguely, and the only witness named is Connie Carpenter. He also briefly explains the equivocal resolution of the flap of sightings: Some scientists thought it was a bird that people were simply misidentifying, some people thought it came from a UFO, but we'll probably never know for sure what it was.

Huffman draws two images of the Mothman. Each chapter opens with a small drawing above the title/monster name, and is followed by a larger, more dramatic image.

This is Huffman's drawing of the Mothman above the chapter heading:
Regardless of how "accurate" it is, it's a very nice image. Note the way Huffman uses the sketchy little lines to suggest darkness or fogginess or simple blurriness. The image is indistinct, and the reason it's indistinct is itself indistinct. But it's nice-looking, and there's a suggestion of the moon and a shape that's vague enough that it could be a winged humanoid, or a large bird or even a giant moth. It might have arms, or it might just have wings of varying degrees of darkness. The eyes can't be seen at this angle.

Huffman gives the reader a clearer look at his Mothman in a spread on the following pages. Here is the right half of it:
It's an even nicer image as it appears in the book, as the four paragraphs of prose are integrated into the image, appearing in the white space Huffman frames as the light coming from a lamp hanging from the ceiling in the inside of the Thomas home (here simply referred to with the words "a family"). We see a curtain rod, curtains and the walls, all rendered in the delicate crosshatching that makes up Huffman's illustrations.

As for his Mothman, well, it looks decidedly off-model, looking more like a bat-winged Nosferatu than the picture of Mothman that emerged from witness reports. Huffman's Mothman clearly has a humanoid head, a nose, a mouth, a chin, a neck and even ears and, as a result, doesn't seem quite as mind-bogglingly weird as the creature of indeterminate appearance that's usually reported.

I like how Huffman depicts the brightness of the eyes without the use of color though, the pure, line-less white the same as that he uses on the moon and the lamp-light on the opposite page: They must be shining with light, as everything else rendered in that manner is (save, perhaps, the window pane, although it is on the inside of the house, where the lights are on, rather than outside the house, where it's dark).

The simple juxtaposition of the dark, strange human-like creature with the mundane, domestic window and curtains, and the scant protection the latter offers from the former is a very effective scary image though, isn't it?

I didn't scan anything else from the book, but Huffman has a lot of fairly effective drawings in here. The small, above-the-heading images generally show equivocal evidence of the creature, and then the larger illustration shows it in all it's glory. So, for example, Bigfoot opens with a drawing of a footprint, and you turn the page and see a drawing of a huge hairy humanoid striding away from the reader and, on the next page, a close-up of Bigfoot's face. The chapter on Goatman opens with a drawing of graffiti on a brick wall reading "Gotaman was here," and the next image is that of a shadowy goatman holding a hatchet and charging into the bright, white-space headlights of an oncoming car.

In addition to Mothman, Goatman and Bigfoot, Cohen covers (and Huffman draws) The Skunk Ape, Washington's Demon Cat, The Flatwoods Monster (another really great illustration), The White River Monster, The Beast of Busco (that's the giant snapping turtle said to live in a lake in Churubusco, Indiana), The Thunderbird and Lake Champlain's Monster.

Some Margot Tomes illustrations for Wanda Gág's tales from Grimm

When I was actively seeking out the work of Wanda Gág, I found a pair of interesting, sort-of posthumous collaborations between the writer/artist and Margot Tomes, who illustrated around 60 books, including James Still's Jack and the Wonder Beans, Barbara Lalicki's If There Were Dreams to Sell and Jean Fritz's Newberry-winning Homesick: My Own Story.

These were The Earth Gnome (Coward, McCann and Geoghean Inc.; 1979) and The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1985), little, child-sized, four-and-a-half-inch by six-inch hardcovers containing Gág's translations of the Grimm versions of these classic stories (previously discussed here).

I was originally a little perplexed by their existence, as it seemed unusual that a publisher would take a specific translation from a particular writer/artist who went about the project in part to provide her own illustrations to the stories, only to subtract those illustrations and replace them with all new ones but I soon appreciated the opportunity these books gave to compare and contrast the way to gifted illustrators might approach the exact same subject matter.

I looked through the Tomas books for instances of her drawing the exact same story moment that Gág had drawn. I'll present them below, but, as these two stories aren't as widely-known as, say, the Grimm versions of Rapunzel or Hansel and Gretel, I suppose summaries of them might be in order.

In the story of the Earth Gnome, there is a king with a magnificent orchard and three beautiful daughters. Everyone—even the princesses—are forbidden from eating the apples from the king's prized tree, which is cursed with a spell. Whoever eats one of the apples sinks far below the earth.

Naturally, the girls do this one day, and find themselves in a prison, each forced to comb their hair of a many-headed dragon. The king offers the hands of his daughters in marriage to any brave young man who can return them, and the youngest of three brothers happens upon a gnome, whom he bests. Once defeated by the youngest brother, the gnome advises him how to find and rescue the princesses, and he does so—despite the trickery of his older brothers.

In the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, a young man feigns illiteracy in order to meet the qualifications of an older man looking for an apprentice. The older man turns out to be a sorcerer, and a wicked one at that. The boy secretly studied his master's magical tomes at night, growing more and more learned in magic, until one day he's caught in the act. The sorcerer acts quickly to destroy the boy, but the boy had learned enough magic at this point to engage in the traditional wizard's battle of turning-into-different-things, and ultimately triumphs by turning into a rooster and gobbling up the sorcerer after the latter had become a kernel of corn.

The apprentice then takes over the magic practice, "And wasn't it fine that all the powers and ingredients which had been used for evil by the sorcerer were now in the hands of a boy who would use them only for the good of man and beast?"

Here is Gág's illustration of the three princesses from the story of the Earth Gnome being swallowed up by the earth, followed by Tomas' illustration of the same:

And here is Gág's illustration of one of the princesses combing the hair of a three-headed dragon, followed by Tomas' image of the same thing:
Finally, here is the image with which Gág ends her story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, followed by the one that Tomas ends her version with:
Tomes also illustrated Gág's versions of Jorinda and Joringel and The Six Swans. She also illustrated versions of The Fisherman's Wife and Hansel and Gretel, but not Gág's translations of those stories.

Wanda Gág's Tales from Grimm

As a children's author and illustrator who grew up listening to relatives reading her old world fairy tales and who could speak German herself, Wanda Gág was ideally, almost uniquely suited for the task of of translating, editing and illustrating collections of the Brothers Grimm's tales.

Two such volumes exist. The first was 1936's Tales From Grimm, in which the renowned author collected 16 different Grimm's fairy tales to freely translate into English and illustrate.

In her introduction, she explains the genesis of the project:

The magic of Märchen is among my earliest recollections. The dictionary definitions—tale, fable, legend—are all inadequate when I think of my little German Märchenbuch and what it held for me. Often, usually at twilight, some grown up would say, "Sit down, Wanda-chen, and I'll read you a Märchen." Then, as I settled down in my rocker, ready to abandon myself with the utmost credulity to whatever I might hear, everything was changed, exalted. A tingling, anything-may-happen feeling flowed over me, and I had the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear.

When, four years ago, I was in the midst of a Hansel and Gretel drawing, the old Märchen magic gripped me again and I felt I could not rest until I had expressed in pictures all that Märchen meant to me.

She read them in their original German, and began by making literal translations of her chosen stories. Finding that some of the stories which seemed so simple and colorful in German turned "think, lifeless and clumsly" when translated literally into English, she decided to try and do a free translation of her own, seeking to preserve the flavor of the originals with her own English words.

Gág discusses her process quite a bit in the introduction to the first volume, why she made the choices she made and how the audience for fairy tales has changed even within her own lifetime.

I can't tell you how good a job she did translating the tales, or how some of her specific translation choices affected the stories, or how they might compare to different choices different storytellers have made over the years. While I've read all 16 of these stories elsewhere, generally in Andrew Lang's "color" anthologies, I think but also in various Grimm-specific collections, I don't know anywhere near enough about the tales to even hazard vague guesses in the direction of criticism of a particular translation or collection. (Not knowing any language but English doesn't help, either).

Among the more popular tales in this volume are "Hansel and Gretel," which leads off the collection just as drawing it set Gág on the path to making the book, "The Musicians of Bremen," "Cinderlla," "Rapunzel," "The Frog Prince" and "The Fisherman and His Wife."

A color illustration of a scene from Rapunzel is used on the cover, and provides a nice example of Gág's plump, young, child heroines and bent, crooked but well-dressed witches, as well as the same sort of dreamy, flowing landscape that was evident in Gág's picture books.

Above the table of contents is this image...It's simple enough in intent and construction, but almost baroque in the amount of swirly little images pouring out of the book at its center. Based on that single image alone, I think Gág succeeded in conveying through a drawing what reading her childhood book of fairy tales must have felt like.

There are a half-dozen full-page illustrations in the first book, and each story begins with a title page, bearing the name of the individual tale and a design-like image to suggest what will follow.

Here are a few from this volume: Smaller illustrations appear throughout the text of each story, and most will begin with an image similar in shape to the one above the table-of-contents, resting atop a block of text like a decorative piece.

Here, from the second volume, 1947's More Tales from Grimm, is an example, from "The Hedgehog and The Rabbit": And here are some of the larger illustrations from the first volume, one of Cinderella beneath her magic tree......(remember, this is a collection of tales from Grimm, not tales from Disney)...and here as an illustration from the climax of "Snow White and Rose Red"... My favorite image in this volume is perhaps a little illustration from "Three Brothers."

That is the story of a father with three sons he loves equally. Unable to decide which of them to leave his house to when he dies, he proposes they each choose a trade and go off to learn and master it, and then they would return and "he who has learned his trade best shall have the house."

One of the brothers has become a barber, and to demonstrate his skill,

He took his mug and soap, and quickly whipped up some suds while the rabbit was running toward them. Then, just as the rabbit ran past them at top speed, he lathered the little animal's chin and shaved it, leaving enough fur for a stylish pointed beard. All this time the rabbit had been running as fast as he could, and yet he wasn't cut in any way.

And this is the image that appears beneath that paragraph: I love everything about that picture, from the look on the rabbit's face, to the style of beard he's sporting to the way Gág expressed motion—you'll see speed lines around the bounding and astonished rabbit, as he apparently looks back at the barber who just shaved him while he was running by, but look closely at the rabbit's hindquarters, and you'll see Gág has drawn suggestions of after-images as well.

The second volume is a much bigger one, but a less complete one—there are over 30 tales included, but Gág passed away before it saw print. There's a long forward written by Carl Zigrosser, one of her two "literary and artistic executors" (with her husband Earle Humprheys being the other) explaining that "the text had reached the stage of final revision," and that while there were about 100 drawings to choose from, only about three-quarters were in their "final pen-and-ink form."

They decided that they were passable illustrations, and to proceed with using them. With many, a reader might not be able to see the difference, yet there are several that are exceptionally sketchy by Gág's standards.

Take, for example, this image that appears above the first page of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids": This was what Gág's images look like before completion, a sort of final draft. While it's not her best work, it is fascinating to be able to see a sort of in-progress image like this, and to be able to compare it to her other, more finished work.

Even the cover of More Tales has an unfinished, sketchy look—it appears to be an image from "The Star Dollars," in which stars rain down from heaven, becoming silver dollars before they hit the ground. As you can see, the shapes are quite indistinct.

The tales collected herein are probably a bit more obscure than those of the first. "Thorn Rose, The Sleeping Beauty" being the most well-known today, although "The Shoemaker and The Elves," "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and the aforementioned story of the wolf and the seven little goats are probably still fairly well known. One of my personal favorites, "Jorinda and Joringel" is also in here, and I think "The Six Swans" is probably pretty well-known—if not in this exact form, then from other variants.

One of my favorite stories in this collection turned out to be—quite to my own surprise—was "The Mouse, The Bird and the Sausage." I've read this one before, but it didn't really strike me as terribly interesting. An anthropomorphic foodstuff—made from pieces of an animal, no less—living with anthropomorphic animals just never sat well with me, conceptually.

Gág's version opens like this:

Once there was a tiny cottage and in it lived no people, only a mouse, a bird, and a sausage. There they had kept house most joyously together for many years, and had even been able to save some money besides.

Each of the three cottage-mates had a daily task to do: The bird flew out to get wood for the fire, the mouse got water from the brook and set the table, and "the big, fat, jolly sausage cooked the meals.

If you're wondering hos a sausage cooks, well, when it's time for dinner, he gets into the pot and swishes himself a round a little in the soup or vegetables, "so as to salt or flavor them."

Gross.

But Gág's drawing of the sausage is so charming! The three little friends' idyllic life comes to an end when the bird listens to some gossip from another bird, becomes convinced that the others are taking advantage of it, and so they all switch jobs and, as a result, die horribly.

Gág depicts her sausage moments before his rather predictable death, when he still looks cute and funny......Aw, look at his darling little shoes!

Gág does a similarly strong job in anthropomorphizing the stars of "The Straw, The Coal and The Bean."

Let's look at two more images from More Tales, which illustrate the unique nature of the book's illustrations, given there are some unfinished ones alongside finished ones within.

Here is an image from the climax of "Iron Hans":It's a fairly finished image, but there's still a degree of sketchiness to it, mainly in the shadows in the folds of the characters' clothes, and in the lines of their hair and on the ground they stand upon. It's all there, of course, but the line work isn't as crisp as usual, the image not as bold. I'm not sure how much more Gág had to do here, but it looks like an illustration some 90% or so finished, just missing the final touches.

Earlier in the book is a full-page illustration for "The Six Swans," and while it's a more ambitious image, filling a page and boasting a rather elaborate setting and background for its two characters, one can still see pencil guide lines around the girl and her hair:Note how finished the vegetation looks, too. In this image, the forest seems to be as important a character as the protagonist, and the secondary character who finds her hidden in a tree.

The Grimm's stories are well worth reading wherever you can find them, but obviously I recommend seeking out Gág's versions. There's a folksier, home-ier, more child-like feel to them than those lush, lavish illustrations you'll find in, say, the Lang color fairy collections, and it's interesting to see a writer translating and re-writing them and then illustrating them herself.

Essentially, Gág developed a dream project for herself, went ahead and did it and, in the process, demonstrated some of her greatest strengths...while accentuating the strengths of her source material.

Another Mothman

This is the cover of The Mothman's Shadow, a 2011 prose fiction book for young readers written by Jason Strange and published by Stone Arch Books. That cover image was created by artist Serg Soleiman. The design recalls the Frank Frazetta version of Mothman or the Mothman depicted in Robert Roach's stainless steel statue in Point Pleasant, rather than the historical, eye-witness descriptions of the creature.

Which is fine in the context of the story, which has next to nothing to do with the historical/folkloric Mothman. It's the story of incoming high school freshman Noah Stiles, his older brother and a carload of his friends driving out to a cabin in the woods of Hidden Lake (not Point Pleasant, West Virginia). There Noah sees the title monster and no one else believes him, until a dramatic reveal in which they all see it—although this Mothman is quite different from the inscrutable and mysterious "real" Mothman. This one's more of a were-moth...? I think...?

Anyway, here's interior illustrator Phil Parks' version of this version of Mothman, first scene through the curtains of a cabin window: And here's another, this one revealing Mothman in all his glory at the climax. Note the eye-patterns on the wings, like the defensive coloration of some moths, and the sensible slacks he's wearing:

A couple more Mothmans

I'm currently working my way through Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside (Visible Ink; 2011) by Brad Steiger and about 20 or so contributors, a big, thick book of stories about various "real" monsters.

There's a chapter entitled "Mothman—Harbinger of Death" about the Mothman, and there were two different illustrations of the subject.

There are a lot of illustrations in the book, and while I'm not terribly impressed with the visual elements of the book, I remain fascinated (to the point of obsessed, I guess) with the different ways different artists try to illustrate the highly abstracted creature, which was sighted scores of time, but which we still don't have a very clear "picture" of.

Here's the first, by Dan Wolfman Allen:It's an extremely accurate depiction of the composite descriptions: No face or head, big glowing eyes that resemble bicycle reflectors, huge wings, whether or not it has arms remaining vague and so on. Pretty detailed and remarkably buff legs, though.


Here's the second, by Ricardo Pustanio:He depicts the Mothman as particularly moth-like, which doesn't really jibe with the descriptions, but I guess if those big, buggy eyes glowed it could be seen as accurate. I guess it depends on what the rest of this Mothman looks like.

The Green Fairy Book isn't a comic book,

but it has both words and pictures in it, so I'm going to go ahead and blog about it here anyway.

Above is an illustration by H.J. Ford from Andrew Lang's 1892 The Green Fairy Book. The story it illustrates is "The Crystal Coffin," which Lang collected from Grimm's collections of fairy tales.

I love Lang's collections and, especially, Ford's illustrations for them, which I'll return to again and again while reading just to stare at and study. This one really gave me pause for an entirely different reason though.

Most of Ford's illustrations, like most illustrations for prose stories, capture a single moment in a story (with a few exceptions, in which smaller pictures are worked into the borders of a larger illustration, as in the image from "Jack My Hedgehog," which you can see below). In this particular image, above though, Ford tries to capture three distinct actions from three distinct moments in a single image.

In a comic book, this would be an exceptionally poor panel, which doesn't really work the way a panel in a comic book should, but then, this isn't a comic book, so it doesn't have to to play by the rules—but this particular illustration is a good, um, illustration of the way imagery works differently in comics versus prose.

The scene depicted is an illustration of the following, told by the princess, who is sitting atop the horse in the image:

...ere long I saw the stranger coming towards me, and leading a fine stag. I asked him where he had left my brother, and how he had got the stag, whose great eyes were overflowing with tears. Instead of answering he began to laugh, and I flew into such a rage that I drew the pistol and fired at him; but the bullet rebounded from his breast and struck my horse in the forehead.

Click on the image and look closely and you'll see a little dotted line from the cloud of smoke at the barrel of the gun, showing the trajectory of the bullet as it bounces off the stranger and enters her horse's forehead.

*******************

Let's look at some more of Ford's illustrations now, shall we?


Above are the three little pigs, from the version of "The Three Little Pigs" collected in here. Also, their mom, whom the little black pig is using as some sort of book-holder.

This was one of my least favorite of the stories collected herein, familiarity breeding contempt, I guess (that, or I'm not that big a fan of the all-animal stories). I was awfully surprised by the contents of the story though, as its details are so different from the ones one usually associates with the story.

These little pigs all have names—Browny, Whitey and Blacky. Their elderly mother builds them each their own houses, out of whatever material they want. Instead of straw, wood and brick, these little pigs have houses out of mud, cabbage and brick. The predator that tries to eat them isn't a big, bad wolf, but a fox. And he doesn't blow their houses down, he simply digs into the mud house and eats his way into the cabbage house, but is stymied by the brick house—and ultimately opts for a chimney entrance and dies in the normal boiled alive in a pot manner.


*************************


The little fellow sitting atop the rooster, an oddly anthropomorphic-looking set of bagpipes behind him, is Jack my Hedgehog, a half-man, half-hedgehog born of his childless father exclaiming, "I must and will have a child of some sort or kind, even should it only be a hedgehog!" I'm sure this Grimm-collected fairy tale, and Ford's illustrations for it, aren't actually the inspiration for Sonic The Hedgehog, but I like to imagine it is.

But enough talk of these stories that aren't even comics. Let's just look at some nice pictures, shall we?


Men with the moon for their heads is another broad category of types of images I think are really cool for some reason. This man with a moon's head is actually supposed to be the moon. It's from the story "The Snuff-Box," in which the hero visits the land of the moon, where the moon's mother informs him that her son "eats all living things he sees." Our hero survives the encounter, however, and goes on to be similarly menaced by the sun and the wind, neither of which get illustrated.


When I first saw this illustration of "Fair Gifts," in which the Flower Fairy sends her charge Sylvia out in a chariot drawn by butterflies, I thought, There's no way even that many butterflies of that size would be able to pull that heavy chariot and that girl, because I am dumb, trying to assign my understanding of physics to a story involving a magical fairy and her magic butterfly chariot.


I really like this image from "Rosanella," in which giant bees carry off twelve princess from a garden party.


The Golden Mermaid, from the story "The Golden Mermaid," was the hottest woman in this book, I think, but she's no Snow-Daughter or Thumbelina, though.