“If something doesn't creep into a drawing that you're not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.” ― Edward Gorey

(Gorey, early 1970s)

I first encountered Edward Gorey as an illustrator; he did the drawings for a peculiar little 1961 book by Paul Behn (who, by the way, went on to write the screenplays for two Planet of the Apes sequels, in large part because of his concerns over nuclear proliferation) I bought as a kid, Quake, Quake, Quake, a collection of Cold War nursery rhymes that mimicked established rhymes and poems, including (which I did not know at the time) Tennyson's Break, Break, Break. I liked the book, and loved the illustrations. So I started looking for Gorey, and discovered he was a prolific writer who popped up everywhere, including, in the '70s, National Lampoon magazine. But he also designed the sets for a '70s production of Dracula and continued to show up in odd corners of pop culture, including the animated opening of PBS's Mystery! series.

But it was his own slim volumes, shaped like children's books but not really, that most attracted me. I'd read Jane Eyre when I was a little kid, and the woodcuts of the famous Random House edition of that book (along with Wuthering Heights) addicted me to finely detailed, crosshatched drawing. And boy did Gorey deliver—but with the added bonus of creating a sideways universe of Victorian quiet, Edwardian delicacy—and all the bottomless strangeness that lies lurking back there in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

But let's leave it there so you can look at these here:

"I come to extend to you my simpitty—"

 If Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927) was the elegant flame that burned brightly (and relatively briefly) on early 20th century newspaper comics pages, George Herriman's Krazy Kat (1913-1944) was—what? The kerosene lantern knocked over in a barn? The St. Elmo's Fire dancing at the tip of a ship's mast? The analogies fall flat—but more than that, miss the mark. Krazy Kat created an alternate comics universe of surreal juxtaposition and hybridity and expressionistic Id-bombs, all wrapped in phonetic shenanigans so strange it's easy to shrug it all off as an artifact from Another Time, way back before WWII, when the U.S. was so radically different that its pop culture jittered and spun in an arrhythmic discontinuity we assume made some sort of sense back then—along with spats and green-door good times, children sent by mail, and hibernating bartenders—but it didn't, really—make sense, that is; instead, it created its own sense, and in the teens and '20s and '30s—times of catastrophe and new-newer-newest-ness followed by mass murder—Herriman's nose-thumbing chaos was a welcome relief. And perhaps best of all, it was drawn with such originality and spare exuberance that it still seems new—and that's because it got under the brainpan of every goof with a pen and an urge to send things flying whichaway, from Chuck Jones' abstracted Southwest (prime real estate for coyote trajectory) to Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and on to Dirty Duck, Pogo and all those underground cartoonists and manga-maniacs who stuck their head aboveground and hooted "Li'l anjil!" at the mundane laws of geometry, physics, linguistics, and sundry fiddlesticks. As Officer Pup once complained, "Unfair somnambulism." A good weird dream for once and all.