Friday, August 28, 2009

Me, If I Were The Mad Hatter



"Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" is my absolute favorite book of all time. I'm totally obsessed with it. I collect copies of it. I have, like, a hundred and fifty or so. Seriously. I'm that weird. I love having different versions to see how various artists portray Lewis Carroll's surreal world. It's amazing how many different ways you can convey that a Hatter is, in fact, stark raving mad. When you include all of the filmed versions of it, the sheer variety of images is pretty darn staggering.

But in my head, the characters will ALWAYS appear the way Sir John Tenniel drew them in the first published edition. I'm sure a lot of people have the Disney versions as their mental "Alice" defaults (if, uh, they have any mental "Alice" defaults at all), but I think Tenniel's skritchy, detailed drawings capture the unbridled weirdness of Wonderland better than lush cell paintings ever could.

My favorite picture from the two "Alice" books is that of Alice holding the pig (that had once been a baby) after rescuing it from the Duchess' house. I, however, didn't want to draw myself as Alice, because, well, that'd be a little weird. So I drew myself as the Mad Hatter instead. Note the sneaky positioning of "Danger" onto his hat...

CHANGE PLACES!


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