Apr 03
Click for full imagePatrick Comments: They might well look worried.
Published 1993
(Average: 7.69 out of 10)
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Patrick Comments: They might well look worried.
Published 1993
(Average: 7.69 out of 10)Loading...
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April 3rd, 2012 at 11:41 am
Actually, the squirrel wasn’t meant to be in the picture, hence his expression.
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:09 pm
By God, Eliot, it is a photograph from life!
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:52 pm
In the Uncanny Valley of the Mammalia
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:57 pm
@SI: Flip back to your comments for Rx is Chaos. Do you remember your race of topless warrior hampster women that stored swords in their cheeks? Behold, I present them to you!
April 3rd, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Y’know, on a Redwall book earlier I suggested that the art was not cartoony enough, and I suspect I’m going to have to eat those words.
First, I do have to give credit for an unusual approach and an interesting use of color and light.
So … Here we have an upper-class squirrel of indeterminate gender and a lower-class bat who is most definitely male (Not like that. Geez. I mean he has facial features, a facial expression, and a posture that British children’s book illustrators always give to the comic-relief male lower-class sidekick. He probably talks like Penfold from Dangermouse.) on an epic quest somewhere. The squirrel will have a normal heroic name. The bat probably has a name like Bindlestick or something and by the end of the book will be hopelessly devoted to the squirrel. C’mon, it’s a trope.
The squirrel’s fur is close-fitting enough that we can tell it has an innie bellybutton, but the panel thoughtfully painted in at the bottom means we don’t know its gender. Based on the goofy eyelashes and the wheatstraw braid on top of its head, I’m guessing girl. (By the way, do European squirrels really have pointed ears like those? In North America they all have tiny round little ears like mice.)
The bat’s position is indeterminate. Is he flying? Or is he hanging off a hook in the panels behind him? He has a sort of hand on his left wing, but nothing but bones on his right. His left foot appears to be a tiny handlike thing (a little above the “a” in the author’s name). Accounting for all the handlike things, that can only mean that that is his right foot holding the dagger under the squirrel’s elbow, since both “her” hands are visible above — and it is disconceringly larger than his left foot. So he’s flying around right next to her with a dagger in his paw.
Looking closer, I can see he has one of those medievalish bowl-shaped haircuts popularized by the Brother Cadfael TV series.
Okay, now I’m going to go look up the book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oaken_Throne
Huh. It’s the epic quest of the squirrel princess Ysabelle and the bat Vespertilio.
Sounds kind of dark. There is betrayal, poisoning, murder, suicide, torture, onscreen ritual sacrifice to dark gods by being skinned alive, doomladen prophecy, excrucitaing violence, and a semitragic ending.
Which means if it were made into a movie, the MPAA would rate it PG (suitable for all but the youngest children) since it has no sex.
But also means that the cover is kind of misleading. I would have thought it a children’s story.
April 3rd, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Nice detail work on the squirrel’s navel. You hardly ever see that.
April 3rd, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Judging by the glare from the approaching headlights this cover isn’t going to end well.
And it gives me a Moody Blues 70’s album cover vibe for some reason.
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:29 pm
I had this book, and the rest of Robin Jarvis’ titles and can reassure everyone that might be worried. All the covers were like this.
They were/are great, creepy children’s books though.
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:57 pm
Nice frame under/around the authors name. Strategically placed no doubt.
April 4th, 2012 at 7:06 am
All this primo crazy, and yet the thing that gets me most is that the squirrel has a navel. And not just any navel, but a navel that is visible through its pelt.
I bet it stores acorns in there.
April 4th, 2012 at 7:08 am
Also I see that these fine nightmare-squirrels and fugue-bats do their “pinky-swears” old school. Like, with a knife.
April 4th, 2012 at 1:48 pm
I see nothing wrong here. I like it.
April 5th, 2012 at 11:03 am
Robin Jarvis is a great author who has recently started publishing again (try Dancing Jax or Freax and Rejex) and, although they are listed as teen books, they are very dark and disturbing. Jarvis is not afraid to get you involved with a character and then kill them. Brutally. A friend’s daughter, who said the stomach-bursting scene in Alien was ‘cool’, had to stop reading one of the Deptford Mice books after a pitched battle scene which was littered with bodies…
April 6th, 2012 at 5:40 am
Is the bat-thing actually flying? He’s looks drunk or half-asleep.
April 11th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
JARVIS! Robin Jarvis bloody traumatised my childhood. First the Deptford Mice, then this series. Good gravy this stuff was dark.
This is the cover from my copy. The art is an accurate representation, and I don’t think it’s particularly bad. I believe the squirrel lady shown is drawn accurately too; she was very old, completely white/grey and blind. But I never liked how her face was painted.
August 20th, 2012 at 11:26 am
Regarding the Artist being unknown – it’s Robert Jarvis himself. He illustrated all his own books.
Great children’s author – do the modern British children’s writers keep alive the tradition of either killing off/corrupting characters, and/or cloaking every story with an air of menace, I wonder?
June 2nd, 2015 at 1:48 pm
That bat looks like a donkey.
Also, the phrase ‘bat looks like a donkey’ can be sung to the tune of ‘dude looks like a lady’.
Try it yourself!
June 2nd, 2015 at 4:09 pm
This cover is SO disturbing, but I can’t put my finger on precisely what makes it so creepy… is it the navel? The eyes? The “on acid” lighting? The schizoid juxtaposition of a mundane word like “Deptford” with art like that? Or all combined?
Don’t look at it for too long, you might go mad.
June 3rd, 2015 at 10:08 am
@Ian: I’m grateful it was placed there.
June 23rd, 2021 at 6:55 pm
This is what you see when you break into a hotel room at a furry convention.
June 23rd, 2021 at 7:35 pm
@Tor Mented: if you’re lucky. They could be doing worse than LARPing.
June 24th, 2021 at 4:53 am
@Bruce: they’re hiding in the room from the embarrassment of all the other furries laughing and wanting to know WTF is with the squirrel ears. Is she part bat? Die FleiderEichhörnchen?
June 24th, 2021 at 1:54 pm
@Bruce: That’s just it. Their guilty looks of surprise make it seem like they planned on doing a lot more than just LARPing!
January 20th, 2023 at 3:41 pm
I’ve actually had the misfortune of having known someone deeply, deeply into this writer (honestly, hopeless writer IMO. guy just writes gore porn for kids, cos he knows kids lit will accept anything short of like, sex. until now, probably why he’s been floundering last few years).
They also happened to be one of the most controlling, strange and insane people I have ever met in my life.
February 15th, 2023 at 3:44 pm
Just to elaborate on how weird fandom psychoes can and will latch on to ANYTHING, even mediocre childrens dark fantasy books with ugly covers…this person was, insanely obsessed with the cults in this guys books, but in particular the cult from the sequel to this book. Cos the lizard cultist murderer was their ‘crush’.
https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780340788677-uk.jpg
This is what they looked like. This was no joke, the love of their life. ET but green, and with murder knives that could melt you inside out. They had a cutesy name for this type of death. ‘Snicky snoo’. No. I dont get it either.
Also, despite being so in love with vicious gore and violence in these books (which involve again, aforementioned meltings as well as copious flayings), they were terrified of violence/gore in film (it would ‘traumatize’ them), as well as of course sex stuff, and even swearing. They would use babytalk terms instead of swear words. Yeah.
How such a person was (even sexually) attracted to violent books with grotesque covers like this…I don’t know. Fandoms are full of such special people, and can form over anything.