Overwhelmed by Ursula Vernon

Okay, look — so I don’t have kids of my own, and my niece and nephews and stepkids are all grown and the next generation is still somewhere out on the misty horizon.

But I keep coming across these nominally “children’s” books which I then wish I had a non-adult excuse to read. Much of the credit (or blame) for this must be placed at the doorstep of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog, whose focus is principally (but not exclusively) on children’s and young-adult books. (The 7-Imp innkeepers, Eisha and Jules, are school librarians.)

Once a week, 7-Imp features the work of a single children’s-book illustrator. This week, the subject was one Ursula Vernon.

Vernon apparently came to children’s books after first succeeding in the Web comics world, as the writer and artist behind Digger, which she describes thusly:

…it is a story about a particularly no-nonsense wombat who finds herself stuck on the wrong end of a one-way tunnel in a strange land where nonsense seems to be the specialty. Now with the help of a talking statue of a god, an outcast hyena, a shadow-being of undeterminate origin, and an oracular slug she seeks to find out where she is and how to go about getting back to her Warren.

That sounds rather… well, precious — right up until you hit the “outcast hyena/oracular slug” part. And indeed, despite her fascination with cute and furry creatures, Vernon does apparently have a knack for putting them in dire straits, depicting them as dangerous characters, and at the very least writing — and writing damn well — about them.

The picture at the top right, for example, is titled “Overwhelmed.” I discovered this and other outstanding bits of her work in her gallery at the DeviantArt site, where she says of “Overwhelmed,” briefly:

And once again, we prove that Ursula trying to do angst = hamsters.

Oh, well. At least they’re expressive little buggers.

Vernon isn’t strictly speaking either a comic-book artist nor a children’s-book illustrator. She seems to be an artist — and a writer — whose work tends to wind up in those two media. Tends to, but doesn’t always; like a lot of writers and musicians I know, she enjoys fiddling with her medium in ways that have little or no mercenary objective… just for fun.

(Oh, she’s not crazy: she does sell prints of her work which doesn’t appear in book form. You can order prints either from her DeviantArt gallery, or from her Metal & Magic site. But she doesn’t particularly seem to care about selling it — posting it evidently as much for amusement as money-making purposes.)

For instance, above and on the left we see her print entitled “Carousel Walrus.” Remember, I said she really writes, doesn’t just draw, paint, or what-have-you. Here’s her commentary on this print:

The Unfortunate Carousel was the life’s work of the regrettable Eighteenth Amir of Sarappa, who dedicated himself to creating the most lavish, elaborate, and grotesque carousel ever made. Carved by the finest artisans, inlaid with gems and precious metals, powered by experimental steam boilers and teams of bullocks, the genius of the Unfortunate Carousel was that it had no horses, but was instead made up of all of those beasts considered graceless, unlovely, unclean, and/or generally obnoxious. Rats and grackles cavorted alongside hippopotomi and squid, rhinos and jackals rode cheek-by-jowl with skunks and gila monsters. By the time it was finished, the Unfortunate Carousel rose two and a half stories, had cost forty-seven lives, driven two engineers mad, and brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, on the first occasion when the carousel was fired up, the main boiler exploded two minutes in, causing general carnage and untold havoc and completely destroying the machinery. The Amir’s plans to build a second, even more grandiose carousel were foiled when he was removed from power by an outraged peasantry wielding pitchforks and uninclined to discuss the finer points of carousel-making.

Specimens from the Unfortunate Carousel have turned up in numerous collections in the following centuries, including this very fine white walrus figure, in the private collection of the Marquis of Widdlemark.

One more; the print, “Potato Priest Vs. The Egg,” is at the right. Here’s the text, from the DeviantArt page:

It was waiting for him, quivering, in the badlands at dawn.

He feared it–feared that unspeakable yolk, that glistening white–but he had learned to conquer the fear. He was a monk. He had recited the seven mantras and performed the eighteen meditations, and he was as ready as one could hope to be.

He searched his heart and found only the emptiness of enlightenment, and so he faced it boldly, this lightly fried horror, this sunny-side-up invader from beyond the stars.

Soon, one of them would have breakfast.

Ha!

I could do this all day long, but by the time I was through it would be midnight and the page would take another 24 hours for you to download. I’ll just add: you have to browse Vernon’s gallery for yourself. Enjoy what you find there (including the Gearworld series, much different from any of the above).

And, of course, buy her books, and buy her prints!