Minding the Baby

Kid's writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak died recently. His book Where the Wild Things Are has stoked up millions of imaginations since it was first published in 1963. There are a lot of monsters in that book but they are a jolly lot, fond of a good loud rumpus. For the SCARY Sendak you could look at his illustrations for another book, Outside Over There.



Here's a picture that leaves a chill. Hooded goblins are stealing away a baby girl while her big sister is practicing the french horn. I don't think it's the goblins that are the scary thing about this image. It's not even the expression of terror on the face of the baby. The ice replica the goblins have left in place of the child is spooky but I don't think it's the scariest thing here either.

The most chilling part of the picture is the distant look on the face of the older girl, utterly absorbed in her music practice and failing to notice what is happening behind her back. Her blank expression feels like a warning. Terrible things can happen just through inattention or distraction. It's a frightening thing to realise becuase we all get distracted sometimes. We will probably never meet evil hooded goblins, but we might forget to look out for those we care about at some vital moment. This picture is a stern warning; take care, mind the baby.

100,000 Lights Floating Downriver

During Tokyo's Hotaru Festival lately 100,000 illuminated blue LEDs were released in the city's river. The solar-powered spheres bobbed their way down the river, drawn in the flow. They looked like the milky way or the freaky phosphorescence you can encounter in southern oceans. The glowing spheres were later caught downstream by giant nets although I like to think that one or two got away and are now exploring the Pacific.

Fig 1.

Fig 2. Photos by jeremy v, makure and ajpscs.

Sensitive Cyclops

If you’re doodling a monster there is one quick way to ensure the viewer knows it’s a genuine out-of-the-subconscious monstrous creation and not just a badly drawn crocodile. Give your creature only one eye. Much of the animal life on earth tends towards symmetry in the arrangement of sense organs. A one-eyed life form seems to contradict some fundamental principle, causing unease. The viewer knows this beast is built to a completely different design than the rest of us. An entirely different form of life that sees the world in a wholly different manner. It is an alien. It is a monster.


Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, 1958.

All the one-eyed creatures of today are probably descended from the Cyclops, one of the cast of the ancient Greek myths. It is a lumbering giant that is outwitted by Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. This image of the Cyclops as brutal, dumb and fond of violence has been its stereotype ever since. The Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad could not even speak, it just lurched about and roared. I can think of only one exception to this sort of Cyclops in art, this painting by Odilon Redon.


The Cyclops. Oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 64 × 51 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Holland. Painted sometime between 1898 and 1900.

What kind of Cyclops is this? Peeking shyly at a sleeping figure in what feels like a misty Garden of Eden. One does not feel the sleeping figure is in any danger. This Cyclops just wants a friend. A constant problem for those attempting to depict the Cyclops is what to do with its nose? The artist sometimes plants the eye in the middle of the forehead, retaining a normal human nose with two weird patches of skin either side. Or they forcefully squash the nose down, like in the movie version above. Redon avoids the problem by simply withholding the nose. He makes his Cyclops a smooth faced creature, not some warped aberration. This helps make it seem childlike, innocent as a lamb. Painting the creature without a nose sidesteps blunt questions of anatomy. Such questions would ruin the soft magic of the image. This Cyclops is made seem even more harmless by the absence of its right shoulder. Where does the far shoulder go? It is just about feasible that it is curved out of view. It matters little, the effect is to make this Cyclops seem dainty and meek. This is Odilon Redon's vision of the Cyclops, at home in a dreamscape.

Monster Monks

It has been a while since we’ve had a Japanese monster, so here’s one now. David Maybury of Children’s Books Ireland drew my attention to this modern take on an ancient spectre, it is the first image below. The beast is the Umibōzu. Or if you prefer 海坊主, a name that combines the character for sea with the character for Buddhist monk.


The illustrator is Shigeru Mizuki and the image is from the Yōkai Jiten, an encyclopaedia of traditional monsters published in 1981.

These spirits live in the sea and if you happen to come close to one your best defence is to look away and pretend not to see it. The Umibōzu are peaceable enough if you don’t hassle them. The worst thing you can do is try and chat with one. That will result in it sinking you and your vessel.

Some say the Umibōzu are drowned holy men, they have the shaven heads of a monk and when seen at sea they often appear to be praying. I read that they are sometimes described as having serpentine limbs like tentacles. These limbs, their big eyes and smooth heads make me wonder if the idea of the Umibōzu may be based on sightings of the Giant Squid. Such squid are rarely seen near the surface but this rarity might have made their appearances all the more frightening.


I got this image of a Giant Squid from here.


This well-known 19th century image of the Umibōzu was created by the wood block artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Physical Curiosities

Physica Curiosa was a reference book of bizarre animals and nightmarish humanoid creatures that, in 1662, were thought to be living out there somewhere in the world. Not too nearby luckily. Its creator was a priest called Gaspar Schott. It is believed that he did not do much fieldwork but relied on the reports of other people.


Left: "Monstrum biceps cum altero capite in ventre,” two-headed monster with another head in its belly. Right: "Monstrum septiceps,” seven headed monster.

The original book is in University of Iowa’s digital collection. You can look at it at this link. I first read about Gaspar Schott’s monster collection at the brilliant blog Res Obscura.

Drawing Ballydog

I visited with the older kids at Kirkistown Primary School in Cloughey, Co. Down lately. We had a good discussion, I talked about my own writing and writing stories in general. Before my arrival the students had been creating drawings based on The Badness of Ballydog. They filled a whole corridor wall and it was wonderful to see them.

Miss Grope does not really appear in the book, she is only mentioned in relation to the fact that Andrew and his pack tap electricity from the mains supply in her garage. One student at Kirkistown felt poor Miss Grope deserved more attention.


Miss Grope. That’s the Villa in the background, a bit taller than I’d imagined it.

There was also a drawing of the fish finger factory, complete with a poisoned seagull dropping from the sky. That looks like the janitor in the foreground, about to scoop up the dead bird and throw it in with the rest of the fish finger's ingredients.


This is pretty much exactly how I’d imagined the fish finger factory. The janitor also happens to be May’s dad and I think he looks about right in this drawing too.

Thank you to all the artists and to everyone else at Kirkistown for the very enjoyable visit.

If anybody else out there has any drawings based on my books or characters I’d love to see them. It would be great if you could take a digital photo or scan them in and send them to me. I will try to put them on this blog.

Two Hells

Gustave Doré was born in 1832 and taught himself to draw as a child. He went on to become a famous illustrator. He had a particularly good eye for monsters.

Perhaps the most famous etchings he produced were illustrations for the Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This long poem describes a tour of hell and was written late in the 13th century. People have continued to read Dante’s Inferno to this day, there are many modern translations to choose from. Far more people read the Inferno than the Paradiso, a tour of heaven that Dante also wrote. This is because badness is more interesting than goodness.


Gustave Doré’s Geryon, 1857.

In part 17 of Dante’s Inferno the visitors to hell meet a monster called Geryon. This creature is a symbol of lies and deceit. It has the face of an honest man but (beware!) the tail of a scorpion. However Geryon helps the visitors on their way, carrying them down to the next level of hell. It flies with them on its back, drops them off and quickly flaps away. A 1843 translation describes the scene like so:

Thus, grounding in the bottom of that pit,
To foot o’ the ragged cliff did Geryon bring
Our human freight, and, of his burden quit,
Sped off, like notch of arrow from the string.

A 2004 translation of Dante’s Inferno modernises it, setting the story in a collapsed and tortured American city. The same part of the story is told like so:

… Greyon finally set us down at the bottom of that rocky cliff. As soon as we climbed down from his back, he was off again like a bullet.

Very 21st century but perhaps not as rich. It is odd that the translator changed the name of the monster, Geryon to Greyon. Why do that? But I love Sandow Birk’s illustrations to this 2004 version. He has modernised Gustave Doré’s work, showing that not only words are open to translation. He has reset the illustrations in the dangerous city, where arrows have become bullets, and portrayed it as a sprawl of parking lots and fast-food joints. One of the most striking illustrations is his retelling of the monster of deceit. It has been transformed into a military helicopter.


The new flying montser.


The Minotaur: “Who when he saw us, as with cankerous rage. Inly consuming, his own flesh ‘gan tear.” John Dayman, 1843.


The Minotaur: “When he saw us, he freaked out by biting himself, growling at us and going psycho.” Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, 2004.

In other illustrations Birk has kept much of Doré’s original composition. Elements are arranged in the same way although with a twist or two. In part 12 the visitors meet the half-man-half-bull that is the Minotaur. It has been sent to the seventh circle of hell because of its violent life. Doré drew the Minotaur in a way befitting an artist embedded in the classical tradition. Birk lives in California and his Minotaur is a brash logo. It is spot lit and standing on top of a food stall next door to a petrol station. In the background skyscrapers loom where Doré had drawn mountains.

In all these pictures Sandow Birk captures what people mean by the term ‘urban hell'.

What Fright Looks Like

The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch lived from 1864 to 1944. Walking in Oslo one evening as the sun was setting he was struck by a vision. He wrote, "looking out across flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and city [ … ] I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature."


The Scream, 1893, oil on cardboard, 36 x 29 inches, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo.

The Scream was Munch's record of his experience that evening. Now the painting has become an icon of anxiety. This is largely down to the powerful simplicity of the face. The face is framed by the palms pressed to its hallow cheeks and contains almost nothing but mouth and eyes, wide-open and aghast. Here is a primary image of fear. It was a primary image of fear before Munch even painted it.

The Scream is world famous image and has gone on to be reproduced, copied, messed-with and recast in countless ways. The pop artist Andy Warhol had a go, as did The Simpsons. The murderous lunatic in the Wes Craven’s Scream movies wears a mask based on the face in the painting. The same mask is always a big seller at this time of year, Halloween. So, independently of the original painting, The Scream lives.

The painting also had a pre-life. Munch heard an “infinite scream pass through nature” but how did he find a face for it? He went to the museum. During his time in Paris an Inca mummy went on display there, Munch went to see it. The body had come from Peru. It had been bound and buried in a jar.


The mummy is still in Paris, in the Musée de l'Homme.

It can be imagined that, when Munch looked upon the mummy, he had found what fright might look like. He painted its portrait and he sent it out into the world. It is still with us today.

Goya's Witches

Francisco Goya was a Spanish painter who lived between 1746 and 1828. He knew about monsters and witches.


Section of The Spell 1797-98. Oil on canvas, 44 x 32cm. Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.

In The Spell a coven are ganging up a terrified man. What a line-up of witchy wickedness they are! One is sticking a pin into a voodoo doll. Another is carrying a basket of dead babies. In this painting, from around 1798, you can see how old the typical image of a witch is. They could be trick-or-treaters dressed in today’s Halloween masks and costumes. All they lack are pointed hats and broomsticks.

That is the problem with the painting. These are nasty witches certainly, but are they really scary? Don’t they look like they are trying too hard? I think this painting has lost its power because it is now an old-fashioned idea of what witches look like.

Goya could do better witches than them …


Witches in the Air 1797-98. Oil on canvas, 43.5 x 30.5 cm. Musea Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Witches in the Air still rates high on the fright-o-meter. These witches wear pointed hats but are unusual in most other ways. They fly but need no broomsticks, they are young and, most importantly, they are male. I don’t know where the idea of witching being a purely female pursuit came from, it is by now the common idea, but it was not accepted in Goya’s time that only girls could grow to be witches.

In the painting a few witches have flown down and have scooped a man away from his friends. One survivor is making a run for it with a sheet over his head. He has his thumbs stuck out between the index and second fingers of each hand. This gesture is called the figa and it is to ward away evil.

This painting is not only scary because it features different kinds of witches from those we are used to. It is the way it is painted. It seems the victim has been picked-on at random. The picture feels like the snapshoot of a crime-in-progress. The witnesses and the inclusion of a commonplace donkey make it seem like a rural scene that has gone suddenly wrong. The witches are not frail wispy things cackling in the shadows. They are painted brightly. They are healthy, they look like they work-out. This coven is solidly real. The have man-handled their victim into the air. He is kicking and screaming. The witches are leaning in and —the horror— they are eating him.