Throwback Thursday: "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" or 26 Ways to Die

"A is for Amy who fell down the stairs."

So begins Edward Gorey's tragic tale of how 26 children meet untimely demises in alphabetical order. AND IT'S AWESOME!

Here again, I find myself reviewing a favorite children's book that I didn't actually read as a child. My mother didn't believe in gruesome deaths and other such unpleasantness. But kids eat this stuff up! One of my favorite games as a child was playing "The Dying Informant", which simply consisted of running into a room, flinging yourself to the floor and pretending to die in the most soap-opera-y, over-the-top, drawn out way you could describe. This book gave me so many methods to add to my repertoire.

It's not just the variety of the scenarios that is interesting, it's the language that Gorey wields so deftly. Each page has no more than eight words, yet every page has a different verb, with pages rhyming in softly rocking couplets like a demented Mother Goose rhyme. It's clear that this isn't a book about children being murdered left and right, it's more a list of tragic and unlikely accidents being divulged in an understated mock-reverent tone. The shortness of the widely kerned sentences forces you to read it slowly and lugubriously, like an undertaker delivering bad news.

For example:

Not "killed", not "strangled", not "murdered". The charmingly dated colloquial "done in by". Tragic, yet tidy. The words may be dire, but Gorey, despite his name, tends to eschew truly violent images, focusing on the moment just before the terrible incident takes place. It creates a giddy tension because the reader knows what is obviously about to happen, yet the children in question seem either totally oblivious, or are only expressing the mildest concern, which is what makes it funny. 

My favorite is:

Not "eaten". Not "mauled". "Assaulted." Like they only meant to take his wallet. Classic.

The book hangs together so nicely because Gorey's illustrative style is as spare as his writing. Bleak high contrast and ambiguously abstracted space creates a vague discomfort and sense of abandonment and insecurity. You laugh, but at the same time, there's a part of you that relates to these helpless children. 

So in the spirit of Halloween, pick up a copy of this cult classic for some ghoulish good fun, and don't let your children get assaulted by bears when they go Trick-or-Treating tonight. Have a safe and Happy Halloween everybody! 

Pirates

It's true.

Warm/Cool color study

New SCBWI Website: The place to be, and where I am

Gah! I'm totally geeking out over the new renovations to the Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators website! So much more user friendly, so handy for learning the ropes of promoting yourself and connecting with the community! If you haven't checked it out, do!

I'm so glad I finally joined. Even though I haven't yet been able to connect with many members, it's an incredible feeling to put my art next to theirs on the same site and be able to step back and realize "I belong here." I have miles and miles to go in my pursuit of mastery in both my drawing and my writing craft. But the community I have reached out to has been so warm and welcoming. Even if I haven't been published just yet, I feel inspired. I feel like I've really found my calling and my career path. Which is really heartening since I rounded out this week with yet another Dayjob person telling me "Yeah....you're not what we're looking for."

Nut's to them. I know what I'm good at. And I know what I love. I know where I'm going, and I know how far I've come. Even a snail can be proud of how far it's come, even if it's only a few inches in the grand scheme. Sometimes it's just that feeling of not being in last place anymore that's just what you need to keep plugging away at the next mile. Right now I feel like the proudest snail. Which is a big deal for me.

More inktober

Interesting Characters

I think there's a certain personality mold that it's assumed that the writers of children's books just fall into. I think people expect us to be warm, fuzzy, wholesome, normal human beings. But a bit of Googling reveals that that's not necessarily the case. Many of the individuals that I would consider to be the greatest in the history of the genre have been, shall we say, "a bit more of the fringe" than one would expect from their writing. So here are some things you might not know about your favorite children's book authors:

• In my browsing through author biographies, I was surprised how many of them were professional pilots at some point in their lives. Roal Dahl was a decorated fighter pilot in WWI who occasionally acted as a spy. He collaborated with fellow intelligence officer Ian Flemming on his book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to create the create the character of The Child Catcher, one of the most terrifying villains in children's literature. Flemming would then go on to create James Bond, inspired by his days in British Intelligence. Other pilots include Antoine de Saint-Exupery, (The Little Prince) who flew mail delivery before turning fighter pilot for WWII. He disappeared while flying a mission over Greece. T.H White, author of The Once and Future King, also took up flying briefly in an attempt to cure his fear of heights.

• Many writers and illustrators, much to their own chagrin, have to hold day jobs. L. Frank Baum, creator of the immortal Wizard of Oz, did nearly everything, trying his hand at raising exotic chickens, selling fireworks, and becoming an actor, traveling salesman and failed newspaper man.

• J.M Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, lost his older brother David in an ice skating accident. Despite having 7 other children, their mother Margaret went into a deep depression over the loss of her favorite son. James donned his brother's clothes and went into cheer her up. She responded to him, and he spent much of his own childhood pretending to be David. The notion of a boy preserved in memory, never to grow to adult hood, provided the catalyst for the creation of Peter and the immortal NeverLand.

• Edward Gorey was asexual. Evidence from correspondence suggests that Hans Christian Anderson, the very founder of children's literature was bi-sexual. Despite growing up in a traditional Jewish household, Maurice Sendak claimed not only to be an atheist but came out as gay after the death of his partner in 2007. But I think my favorite surprise of the bunch was P.L Travers, born Helen Goff, and author of the Mary Poppins books. Travers had affairs with both men and women, but to me that wasn't the most interesting thing about her. At the age of 40, she adopted a son named Camillus from Ireland, who was one of twins. She did so under the advice of her astrologer, and refused to adopt his twin brother. The boy did not find out he had a twin brother until he was 17 and the young man turned up on his doorstep.

• I was actually disappointed to look up Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snickett, to find that he seems to have channeled all his would-be life drama into his alter ego. The most interesting thing he did before his writing career took off was to be a working musician, playing accordion in a couple of bands in college. 

But there you are. Just goes to show you can't judge a book by it's cover, an author by their books, or anything by what you read in a sensationalist Victorian newspaper.

Inktober

So....here are my feeble contributions to the whole Inktober effort. The idea is to draw an inked picture every day for a month, and though I draw almost daily, I tend not to ink anything since I put aside my Kevin Zombie comic.  Plus, I'm always late to the party when it comes to internet group movements. I always end up as a flash mob of 1.

Trying to channel Arthur Rackham here and not doing it too well. My fellow Painting Drama classmate Michelle is so much better at it than I am.Check out her tumblr.

When all else fails I pretend I'm in a mid-century Sears catalog and draw my outfit.