Via Heidi at The Beat comes a link to the next project by The Ticking creator Renée French, Micrographica (I’m assuming the name is a variation on Robert Hooke’s famous Enlightenment work Micrographia from the 1660s, which used the new science of ‘opticks’ to draw highly detailed illustrations of the microscopic world).
From the site:“A mob of tiny rodents live la vida loca, led by the trash-talking bully Moe, and his trash-talking sidekick Preston. Add in Nubbins, the big guy; poor, sweet crapball-lovin’ Aldo; and a rotting corpse turned playground, and you’ll never find a more moving affirmation of traditional values. Inspired by a bald bird sighting the author had on Hunter’s Hill in Sydney, Australia, this book is pure weirdness — just what Renée French fans dream of. With guest drawings by Jim Woodring, Penn Jillette, Dean Cameron, Dylan Williams, James Gunn and more.”
And just because I am in the mood and because Hooke’s illustrations of the new world revealed to him through his microscope are still quite amazing more than three centuries later, here is a flea as he first revealed it to the world via his optical experiments during that heated time of scientific advance. Interesting, but not comics really related? Ah, but consider – Hooke is in the avant garde of experimenters who literally taught us of new ways to look at the world around us, which, arguably, is what the best comics artists do to this day. And in an SF link he also crops up as a character in Neal Stephenson’s incredible Baroque Trilogy, along with Newton and Pepys. Thus endeth today’s micro-lesson.
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January 15th, 2007 at 11:10 am
[...] The British Library in London is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of one of my favourite poets and artists, William Blake with an exhibition which runs until March, which also includes more modern material inspired by Blake, including a portion of Philip Pullman’s manuscript for the Amber Spyglass. Blake, of course, wrote The Tyger among many other famous works and also illustrated editions of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy, long, long before comics artists were drawn to tackling those huge works of world literature (for one small example, just look at Mike Carey drawing on Dante for Hellblazer: All His Engines recently. And does’t the main illustration below look like a sketch for a cover of Mike’s Lucifer series?). Central to the exhibition is Blake’s notebook, packed with observations, poetry and his highly imaginative illustrations. And in a piece of great news for those of us who can’t visit the exhibition in London, the British Library has digitised the notebook and added it to their Turning the Pages section of their site, where you use your mouse to actually ‘turn’ over the pages to leaf through the work, making the work accessible to anyone online – what a wonderful idea. Actually while you are on that page have a look at some of the other digitised works the British Library has made available, including The Original Alice by Lewis Carroll, which would be terrific to read ahead of Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland this spring. Hmm, coming on the back of mentioning Hooke’s illustrations in Micrographia we’re getting a bit literary this week; I may start spouting poetry if we’re not careful (I’m fighting the urge to put the the text of the Tyger on here right now in fact). [...]
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