The Persecution and Assassination of the Baker as Performed by the Inmates of the Hunting of the Snark Under the Direction of Lewis Carroll

This stanzel of The Hunting of the Snark would make anyone faint away, the way it leers at us with its inky visage of squiggly lines and blobby crochets, all of ‘em denoting a sound and fury signifying nothing, nothing at all!

Why does this artist feel it necessary to illustrate an otherwise ordinary bit of verse about the dangers of fainting on the job with this overly baroque reference to the Rake’s Progress of William Hogarth?

Is he making some futile, pseudo-erudite stab at a bit of ironic postmodern reference to a long-dead fellow illustrator, a useless pastime when one considers that no one reads comic books for that sort of thing anymore?

Or has he gone mad? Has the cheap brand of india ink which he surreptitiously imbibes when no one’s looking rotted out his last synapses, synapses already nibbled down to a nub by Stravinsky's rakish earworm?

Or is he, like the Baker, simply overwhelmed by the horror of it all, by that creepy Mistuh-Kurtz-he-dead malaise which so pervades Lewis Carroll’s Snark and the modern world?

Questions, questions everywhere, they’re the bane of all thinking folk … just look at the pretty picture and admire my off-hand reference to Mister Hogarth’s Line of Beauty.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Old Snarks for sale, old Snarks, prim Snarks, silly and grim Snarks for sale