The Bellman rings twice

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and explained here, page by page, panel by panel, squiggle by squiggle … right now we're in Fit the Seventh …

Leaving someone to their fate is all the rage in certain philosophical circles. The smart set calls it a feeble-minded tautology but we think it's a splendid excuse for yet another obsessively cross-hatched depiction of Karl Marx shaking his fat German booty in a tight-fitting Hindustani harem outfit.

Of course, if you just tuned in to this GN version of The Hunting of the Snark, you're probably eying the exit by now, eager to get away from all this eschatological psychobabble but if you're a regular habitue of these parts, you'll know that all of the above is just another example of this artist's singular inability to clearly explain whatever it is that he's up to.

The shehnai-playing monkey and the bewigged barrister-pig are window-dressing for the real "meat" of this stanzel is the squiggly, blobby bits of ink encrusted on the right-hand margin, the ones that spell out the word "BOO". This word's grim import will become clearer later on but for now, I suggest that you avoid making eye contact with it.

Snark drawings are the New York subway-riding winos and psychos of the illustration and comix world; reeking of strong ink and sour, week-old tautologies fished out of filth-ridden dumpsters, they spell nothing but trouble, especially of the B-O-O ilk.

So go ahead, give 'em your spare change if you want to but you know what they'll do with it, don't you? … far better to leave them to their fate while you scurry back to your cozy, safe home in the predestinarian suburbs …

Meanwhile, a propos of nothing in particular … here's Terry Gilliam's take on making a living in the arts:

"If I'd actually learned any of the lessons, I wouldn't be making films anymore. I try not to learn. I spend most of my life unlearning …"

Soyez zen, Mr. Gilliam!

Everywhere man is born free and everywhere man is snarked

You know that your professional life has taken a turn for the better when people will pay to see your drawings of The Banker, AKA Karl Marx, vamping his way through the British Raj in blackface (or brownface, to be precise). But I digress …

This stanzel is jam-packed with jolly bits of scrumptious, Nonsense-soaked Carrollian references. Would it interest you to know that:

1. Mimsy is a portmanteau of miserable and flimsy. The word is current throughout the Carrollian Multiverse, ranging from Snark Island to Looking Glass Land. Pessimistic linguists call this sort of thing a Grimm Shift, while their more psychologically attuned colleagues prefer to call it a Freudian Slip. The main thing is getting the word out of her knickers and into something a little more comfortable.

2. The Banker is rattling his bones and fingering his hair; the former is a reference to Mister Bones, a stock character in Victorian minstrel shows who would literally play himself, ie., play the bones … and the latter is a probably just the Banker luxuriating in his newly-minted, windswept locks.  Dialectical materialism works wonders on the dreaded Bed Head.

The Bone Player, by William Stanley Mount

3. The deliciously well-turned line, "words whose utter inanity proved his insanity," is a cleverly veiled jab at the letter "S", whose appearance inside a word, say inanity, seems sufficient here to render it unfit to operate heavy machinery or make major financial decisions. This petty defamation of the letter "S" is itself a classic example of the inability of most phonemes to just get along. Why can't they learn to live in peace with one another? It's utter insanity, their communal inanity.

The Jewel in the Snark

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and explained here, page by page, panel by panel, squiggle by squiggle … right now we're in Fit the Seventh … the Banker, played by Karl Marx, is going blackface …

What better way to get into the genuine spirit of the holidays than to ogle this salacious image of Karl Marx in blackface, doing a Carrollian bump and grind?

Lesser-minded readers will reach for their politically correct smelling salts or even their attorneys but well-oiled Carrollians will heave a self-satisfied sigh of relief at all of this, for they know that in this, Fit the Seventh of our GN version of the Hunting of the Snark, the Banker has been transmogrified twice! First by this artist, who has been depicting him throughout this Snark as Karl Marx and second, by his nemesis, the Bandersnatch, who has reversed his various Caucasian, upper-crust British Victorian polarities into those of a rupee-less, paan-chomping Hindustani rickshaw wallah slumming his way through the salad days of the British Raj.

All of this is per the instruction of the Admirable Carroll, naturally, so don't look askance. He wrote it all down in black and white anapaestics, in a coded message entitled The Hunting of the Snark which this artist then de-ciphered into anapaestic, Protosurrealist crosshatchings of the darkest, inkiest splendor.

It is horrible and senseless and rather confusing, this Carrollian Multiverse we call the Snark and as the observant reader can see below, its gravitational perturbations are rippling through the very fabric of time and space as we speak. Observe this oddly-shelved copy of our Snark which was spotted at a bookstore, endeavouring to say what its tongue could no longer express …



Thanks to my keen-eyed friend and poet Sommer Browning for alerting me to this curious incident and please, if the person responsible for this shelving is reading this, accept my heartfelt thanks. I salute your innate sense of Surrealist horror, your senseless grimace at the pigeon-holing, soul-crushing dictates of modern commerce.

Lewis Carroll rubbing his tweedy shoulders with Sappho and Ovid, the mind boggles deliciously.
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NB. My essay on draftsmanship, Art Spiegelman and graphic novels is up at the Hooded Utilitarian. To tell the truth, the entire subject of draftsmanship wearies me … it seems immaterial to most readers and many artists and yet the literary equivalent of bad writing  is (mostly) unacceptable in print. Why are the public's standards for drawing so much lower than writing?

I am an Invisible Snark

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and explained here, page by page, panel by panel, squiggle by squiggle … right now we're in Fit the Seventh … the Banker, played by Karl Marx, is going blackface …

 In an earlier stanzel we subjected The Banker/Karl Marx to the indignities of vamping as a perfumed houri in the lascivious environs of a Turkish harem but that is nothing to his current employment in a Carrollian minstrel show.

Yes, the Bandersnatch has worked its magic at last, the hypnotic spell of the Orient has done its groovy hypno thing and both reader and Snarquista stand amazed at this climactic thing-um-a-bob at the heart of Fit the Seventh.

Reflexive readers will grasp that there is a bit of artistic commentary going on here, most of it focussed upon Victorian British attitudes towards their Indian subjects but lighter-hearted readers can just go ahead and spit up their mulligatawny soup whilst sitting in their bungalow, enjoying their calico pajamas and taking a good dekko at this latest instalment of The Hunting of the Snark.

And why not? It's all Nonsense and has hardly any bearing on anything at all except whatever I've surreptitiously meant it to have, ie. it's a wonderful thing to be seen!
Clear as rain, I should think.

NB. My memory is its usual swiss cheese holey thing but I remember reading somewhere of a minstrel show version of the Snark performed in the USA shortly after its publication … perhaps one of Doug Howick's more startling discoveries?

 The ultimate Christmas gift for the Adventure Time fan …

… my original art for the cover/interiors of the NYT-best selling Adventure Time Encyclopaedia (2013, Abrams) … on sale at The Beguiling. This original art is unlike any other contemporary inking you’ll see: resembles copper-plate engraving on Japanese rice paper … extremely tight and delicate line-work floating above a translucent matrix … crosshatched like a dollar bill but TIGHTER, RETINA-CRUSHINGLY-TIGHT … no pro-white, no scraping. Just pure “mathematical”, psychotropically linear eye-candy. There's more description at The Beguiling's blog …

A Snark's Christmas in Wales

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist, and explained here, page by page, panel by panel, squiggle by squiggle … right now we're in Fit the Seventh …

A sudden outbreak of paranoid Orientalism has overwhelmed every drop of precious ink spilled upon this stanzel. Where once we saw pleasantly buffoonish Snark Hunters disporting themselves against a backdrop of English garden parties and nursery room labyrinths, we are now confronted with the raw animal passions of … well, animals.

The role of animals in Marxism is only lightly touched upon in academia but thanks to our cunning stratagem of employing Karl Marx to play the role of the Banker in this GN version of the Snark, it's about time we put an end to all that sort of thing.

As always, it was the Italian supra-surrealist Alberto Savinio who first grasped the essence of the animal-proletariat's dilemma:

Totemism is a sign of the dignity animals once enjoyed, a testimony that the earth was once a paradise. But the memory of this paradise grows more and more dim.

Paradise is precisely what both capitalism (the Banker) and Marxism (Karl Marx) promise all humans foolish enough to check in their brains at the door whenever invited to warm themselves beside any sort of comfy, warm mental fire.

And what was Orientalism for the Victorians but just more of the same? A paradise peopled by commodified humans regarded as monkey-like primitives (the worst sort of totems) until they clapped you inside a Bandersnatch's basket.

Go ahead and threaten them with your mass-produced, rationalist's forks and hope and smiles and soap but it's just as you feared: ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee, just as you feared …
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The ultimate Christmas gift for the Adventure Time fan …
… my original art for the cover/interiors of the NYT-best selling Adventure Time Encyclopaedia (2013, Abrams) … on sale at The Beguiling. This original art is unlike any other contemporary inking you’ll see: resembles copper-plate engraving on Japanese rice paper … extremely tight and delicate line-work floating above a translucent matrix … crosshatched like a dollar bill but TIGHTER, RETINA-CRUSHINGLY-TIGHT … no pro-white, no scraping. Just pure “mathematical”, psychotropically linear eye-candy. There's more description at The Beguiling's blog …