Sep 16
Cliftopher’s Art Direction: Give me a dinosaur with a baby’s head. A freakin’ big dinosaur with a really little baby’s head. And while you’re at it put some kind of mountain like a man in the background.
Published 1982
Many thanks to Cliftopher!
September 16th, 2010 at 10:29 am
This one is weird, but in a good way!
September 16th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Is that a mountain shaped like marlon brando? Nice.
September 16th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
I fear you have the proportions wrong. That’s clearly a freakin’ regular size dinosaur with a really really really big baby’s head.
September 16th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
One damn ugly baby.
And: Cosmicomics. That’s Cosmic omics. Or Cosmi comics.
(Yes, the roll over, tool-tip quip did sort of mock this already; but to me, Cosmicomics is more mindbogglingly funny than the cover art.)
September 16th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
This had to be artwork left over from something else. Has no relation to the tone of the stories.
September 17th, 2010 at 1:53 am
Having read Calvino(but not this one) I can say without a doubt that the artist knew what he was doing.
September 17th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Brendan, somehow that made me think of the distinction between murder and manslaughter and how much the victim cares.
September 22nd, 2010 at 1:24 pm
gotta give it to them… that thing really is terrifying.
October 1st, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Very odd. The cover of the new penguin edition is beautiful though…
http://www.theprogrammist.com/rt/wp-content/uploads/cosmicomics_dust_jacket.jpg
March 19th, 2012 at 6:31 pm
Finished this one up in January. The main protagonist is a being of some ilk who exists and interacts with our space-time but is phenomenally long lived. Actually, it’s not clear if he’s corporeal the whole time, or reincarnating or quite what. Calvino never makes it clear, nor is that his agenda. I presume, therefore, that this is what the cover artist was going for with Big Papa Moai there in the background.
As for the dino-baby, unfortunately, that references the text, tho the artist is doing a terrible job of conveying the idea. One of the short stories in the volume is about the last of the dinosaurs, who falls in love with a dinosaur-mammal hybrid. Never you mind the biological impossibility of such a union bearing such fruit. It certainly wouldn’t look like a human; it certainly wouldn’t look like Apatosaurus, which had been extinct for millions of years at that point; and it wouldn’t look so chimaeral at all!
I found the book oh so very hit-or-miss. Some of the stories, like the dinosaur one and the one about harvesting cheese from the moon, were funny and sad and beautiful. Others, though, got too didactic. Calvino seems to have found humor in a kind of existential word-play that was moderately amusing the first time I read it, but came off as laboured after I read it in each and every story.
October 4th, 2013 at 12:35 am
WHERE CAN I GET THIS, I THINK I NEED IT.
August 25th, 2015 at 1:30 am
I’m pegging the existence of a dinosaur with a human head on the giant earth elemental in the background.