Out there in the CGAA community, students are taking on the literary heavyweights - Oscar Wilde, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. As authors dealing with heightened moods and feverish visions, their respective works lend themselves to strong stylisation and gothic excess. Poe's rather nasty 1845 short-story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, depicts the gloopy consequences of keeping an otherwise dead body 'alive' via the power of mesmerism; said consequences are outlined in this squishy concluding passage:
"As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of "dead! dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity."
Nice.
Below is another illustration by Harry Clarke, whose work was featured recently in The Supplement. The horror of Valdemar's super-accelerated decay is conveyed here in startling fine-line filigree...
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - Harry Clarke
Bahij Jaroudi's animated transcription of the same story adds delicious black comedy into the mix - oh, and a comedy cat. Jaroudi is an animator and illustrator working in Beirut. Visit his blog here.
Comments
Post a Comment