The Envious Siblings
and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
Eight gleefully macabre rhyming vignettes by an award-winning comics artist, as delightful as they are deadly.
Inspired by the dark imagination of Edward Gorey, Envious Siblings is a twisted and hauntingly funny debut. Comics artist Landis Blair interweaves absurdist horror and humor into brief, rhyming vignettes at once transgressive and hilarious. In Blair’s surreal universe, a lost child watches as bewhiskered monsters gobble up her fellow train passengers; a band of kids merrily plays a gut-churning game with playground toys; and two sisters, grinning madly, tear each other apart. These charmingly perverse creations take ordinary settings—a living room, a subway car, a playground—and spin them in a nightmarish direction.
Envious Siblings heralds a brilliant new cartooning talent, and will captivate readers who have thrilled to the lurid fantasies of Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake, Charles Addams, Shel Silverstein, and Tim Burton.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blair (The Hunting Accident) unveils a gruesome collection of eight repellent Gothic faux nursery rhymes. Each tale follows anachronistic youths along their sinister, often violent paths. "The Malicious Playground" stars a gaggle of children who gleefully torture one another at recess, while "Honourable Beasts" features a young girl enticed by gentlemanly wild animals to join them for dinner where her mother is to be eaten. Blair wears his adoration for Edward Gorey and Tim Burton on his sleeve, but it never moves past homage; some segments are difficult to evaluate beyond their riffs on Gorey originals (his monster-infested "Awful Underground," for instance, closely recalls elements of "The Wuggly Ump") with the gross-out factor dialed up. Blair's skill is evident, but there's an overall flatness to his cross-hatched preening figures. Though some of his poetry elicits a chuckle or a startled gasp, Blair's debut solo collection mostly mirrors his inspirations, drenched in shock value.
