Painting Moby-Dick One Bloody, Brilliant Page at a Time
Moby-Dick in Pictures
by Matt Kish
Tin House Books, 2011
600 pages / $32 Buy from Tin House Books
We often speculate on the future of the book, mourn its possible extinction, and dream of what strange offspring the future intercourse of form and technology might yield. In an age where digital media reigns supreme, Moby-Dick in Pictures is a brilliant, nightmarish argument in defense of the book as a physical object of art. It reads like a labor of hatred and love, the manifestation of the artist’s intimate and tortured, relationship with Melville’s nineteenth century masterpiece.
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October 14th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
October 14th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
Illustrating McCarthy and Melville
page 67: He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound.
Remember how Zak Smith did that cool illustration of Gravity’s Rainbow? Well now he’s doing Blood Meridian as a collaborative project with Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle.
Also, Matt Kish is doing one for Moby Dick:
Page 048 : Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Herman Melville writes for Friends.
So, you know when you’re watching a fairly uninspired sitcom, or a middle of the road comedy film, there’s that scene where two straight guys end up having to share a bed for the night and, invariably, when they wake up the next day, one guy has his arm around the other and they are all cuddled up and then they both freak out and jump up and act masculine? Or one wakes up and the other is so completely out of it, he doesn’t, and the one who is awake has to try to get himself out of the situation somehow?
You know how you watch that scene and say: “Oh, yeah. This again.”
That scene? You know that scene, right?
Did you know Melville invented it?