How Edward Gorey Inspired Me To Make My Own Thing
Twisting the Gashlycrumb Tinies into a brand new project - 13 years ago...
Having a job is amazing. It means you can pay your bills and eat food and keep the lights on. Maybe if there’s a little left over, you can go to the cinema, see a show or even save for a vacation.
But unless your job is everything you ever want it to be (and in my experience, they rarely are), you may find that job satisfaction can be somewhat lacking. You take it where you can find it — in the interactions with colleagues that make you smile. The pat on the back for a good piece of work. And picking up personal projects during your down time.
In 2011, shortly before the birth of my eldest, I was looking for such a project — one that could really re-direct my focus and send me somewhere unexpected.
A friend introduced me to someone and it really made the lightbulb over my head flicker into life.
He dropped me a message — “Saw this and thought of you. It’s kinda weird.”
Hmm.
Another message followed containing a page-by-page breakdown of what looked like a Victorian children’s picture book by some guy I’d never heard of called Edward Gorey.
Edward Gorey was an American writer and illustrator who often drew unsettling Victorian style pen-and-ink scenes. He wrote 116 books and in 1963, he created the most inspirational work.
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
It was a seemingly innocent children’s alphabet book. On closer inspection, there was a dark wit inside that begged to be enjoyed by grown-ups. One might say that it was not aimed at children at all.
Each page was a pen-and-ink illustration of a child dying, usually in a mundane and ordinary way — far from the fantastical ways that anxious children often imagine they might meet their ends. Underneath each image, was the name of the child and how they died, in the form of half of a dactylic rhyming couplet.
I loved the book. I thought the concept was awesome. I really dug how it looked like it was an innocent kids’ book, but there was much more to it…
I wanted to do some analysis on what I liked about it and why. My mind started racing — what bits of this project could I take, to kickstart my own thing?
Why did I think this book was so great?
It’s a really simple concept. 26 black and white illustrations, one for every letter of the alphabet, each on its own page. Underneath: half of a rhyming couplet, written in dactylic poetic meter.
Take the first two lines as an example:
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs
B is for Basil assaulted by bears
So A and B are a rhyming pair, C and D, E and F and so on….
It makes for lively, cheerful poetry which betrays the gravity of the subject matter. When you factor in the amusingly dark illustrations, you can sense the mischief in Gorey’s tone.
Dark appeal
In the ordinary way that some of the children die, and the deliberate lack of much going on in some of the drawings — Gorey’s really pulling away from the fantastical here, and ushering in a feeling of grim everyday boredom and normality. Life and death, as they usually are. It’s simple and it’s beautiful.
I wouldn’t describe my sense of humour as dark so much, more black as night. Anything that diffuses the typically seriousness with which death is often treated and makes it more light-hearted and fun is just fine with me.
Don’t just copy — extend
I wondered if there was a way I could take the basic premise of this concept, knowing what I liked about it and then add a little personal flavour in to really make it my own thing — what might that look like?
I had been playing around with drawing my own characters. I’m not great at traditional, realistic drawing. I prefer more abstract shapes, and a certain roughness where I can hide my lack of finesse and drawing skill, to focus more on style. Think more Simpsons than da Vinci.
In all of my doodling — this little orange guy came up again and again. I found myself drawing him a lot. I just couldn’t shake him.
I couldn’t say what he was — or how I could link him into something inspired by the Tinies, but I found myself drawing him in a number of different ways.
So I had:
the idea of a graphic alphabet book that looked like it could be for kids, but was aimed more at adults
the desire to create a series of darkly comic illustrations
a character I was doodling that was almost insisting on being involved somehow
I just needed a theme to pull this all together and then I drew this.
I don’t know why I drew it — I was just working on the principle that you make enough lines, they join in to shapes and then stuff kind of suggests itself to you. But once I drew it, I knew I had my theme: movies.
More specifically, movie deaths! I had all of movie history to pull from — from the boring, to the fantastical, to the outright violent! All I had to do now was find the right death, characters that started with the right letter of the alphabet, and the right rhyming couplets. Easy, right?
Well. Here I am, almost thirteen years later, with an A to R. Not an A to Z.
An A to R and a rather rushed advent calendar’s worth of images without rhymes that I drew for a blog that used to pay out in crypto.
I only blame myself for not finishing it. To say I haven’t had enough time is nonsense. I’ve prioritised doing literally every other thing in my life, over completing a set of 26 drawings that I could have pulled into a print-on-demand book, artwork or even kept to myself to admire and reflect on something I created and finished.
Every now and then, I feel a pull to come back to this. Because I think I had something at that time that I’ve rarely experienced since. A good idea that could be ‘the one’ — the singular idea that we chase that just might change everything. Something in my head tells me to finish this — because it’s good.
I’m trying to follow my own advice to let go of perfection and focus on process — and just get it done. But I’m finding it hard.
So I’m going to bring this project out in the open, in the hope of attracting some collaborators who might be able to help me see this one through.
I’ll be documenting what I have done so far, right here on Substack — for folks to comment on, suggest improvements and let me know when something feels done. Because I just don’t think I’m going to get there on my own.
Like Frodo stumbling his way into Mount Doom, I need a Samwise or few, to help me throw this burden into the fire and shrug this Gollum off my back.
And if I’m here in a year’s time, still shouting into the ether — I might have a body of work about a body of work that may be of value to others who, like me, love to understand others’ processes and how they jump from one decision to another.
Thanks for reading!
See you next week.