The Claws That Catch at Guys Lit Wire
June 24th, 2008 by jules
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
I’m only capable of such exuberant Carrollian language after having had a couple cups of coffee.
I’ve got a post over at Guys Lit Wire today. It’s all about Christopher Myers’ reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky from last year. Yes, I’m a bit slow in getting to this title, but better late than never. Here’s how the post starts out:
Leave it to artist Christopher Myers to remind us that not all children’s books are merely the “products of wild imaginations and unfettered flights of fancy,” as they are often made out to be. “{M}y books are, more often than not, products of painstaking research,” he writes in the closing author’s note of Jabberwocky, Myers’ re-imagining of the classic nonsense verse by Lewis Carroll, published last year by Jump at the Sun/Hyperion.
And leave it to Myers to present us with another example of a picture book that appeals to teens. Myers takes this legendary poem—written over one hundred and thirty years ago and published in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Carroll, the pen name for the Reverend Charles Dodgson—and sets it on the basketball court in a contemporary, inner-city setting: “The slithy toves” who “did gyre and gimble in the wabe” are jump-ropers, looking over their shoulder to see the Jabberwock’s entrance onto the basketball court. He’s a basketball behemoth, a cyclopean man with seven fingers, looming on the court, ready for a face-off. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”
You can read the rest here.
Note: The June Carnival of Children’s Lit, “Fathers in Children’s Books,” is also up over at Susan Taylor Brown’s blog.
