BEASTS: Monstrous Fun

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Jan. 2, 2007 Sign up now!

by Chris Barsanti -- Publishers Weekly, 1/2/2007

Back in the Middle Ages, before an abundance of science and exploration stripped the world of much of its artful mystery, there existed a wonderful thing known as the bestiary. Essentially compendiums of certain kinds of flora or fauna ("beasts"), the books were heavily illustrated and often fancifully written handbooks that not uncommonly included creatures or plants that existed only in mythology, but were treated as though real.

Although today's photographed and scientifically vetted guidebooks to the natural world come off as depressingly literal in comparison to the bestiaries of yore, the tradition never completely died. As recently as the 1960s, Jorge Luis Borges published an English edition of his own bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, which contained everything from the Golem and the Kraken to lesser-known creatures like the Ass with Three Legs.

In January, Fantagraphics' art director Jacob Covey continues this tradition with a project sure to be greeted with a certain shivery anticipation by lovers of the dark and unknown: Beasts! A Pictorial Schedule of Traditional Hidden Creatures from the Interest of 90 Modern Artisans.

Covey first brought the idea to Fantagraphics' owner Gary Groth in March 2005 and almost immediately got to work soliciting artwork and researching the hundreds of necessary beasts. (Although the fancifully lavish, McSweeney's-esque binding and presentation may lead readers to believe the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, each creature in the book is "real," in the sense that it is drawn from a mythological or folkloric tradition somewhere, and not just invented out of whole cloth by Covey.)

As is painfully clear from the 200-page finished product, Beasts! was a massive undertaking, allowing each artist the room to produce his or her own unique take on mythological beasts of greater or lesser renown. This may not be as easy as it sounds, with potential problems ranging from too little information to too much. On the one hand, it's all well and good to find out, as artist Nathan Jurevicius did, that the Drac is an invisible shape-shifting sea serpent that for years terrorized the French town of Beaucaire, but it's quite another to turn that knowledge into a page of four-color art. On the other hand, while you would think that Sam Weber got a great assignment with the well-known vampire, it could also have been a curse: how to make an original representation of possibly the most overreported fantastical creature in the popular imagination?

Beasts! For the record, both Jurevicius and Weber come through with flying colors. And they aren't alone, as Covey and his 90 assembled artisans have created a wonderfully enjoyable and smartly produced piece of imaginary research. The structure is as simple as it should be, with left-hand pages containing a block of elegant text describing a particular beast ("The colossal Chenoo, an icy-hearted cannibal known to madly chew off even his own lips, is mentioned often in Passamaquoddy and Micmac stories by Native Americans in the northeastern United States") facing a full-page graphic representation. The styles are astoundingly variable, ranging from whimsical—Mizna Wada's kitschy rendering of the Kudan, "a Japanese horned beast with a human head (and a possible extra set of eyes) and a bovine body"—to the horrific—Jason Robards goes for the gut with a grisly, visceral drawing of the "horrendous and largely anarchic Acephalites." The artwork isn't always literal, either; check out Kevin Dart's representation of the Odontotyrannus ("[an] amphibious, human-eating monster" from India, said to be so large that it could swallow an unlucky elephant whole"), which takes the form of a 1960s, Godzilla-style monster movie poster.

Although the title page of Beasts! proclaims it to be "Part the First" of "The New Modern Now Library Series," at the moment, Covey and Fantagraphics have no plans to turn this venture into a series. One can only hope they will reconsider.

« Back | Print