I covered Adam Allsuch Boardman’s previous Illustrated Histories (Ghosts, UFOs) last year alongside my Usborne World of the Unknown books (a natural pairing, as Boardman seems at least partially inspired by them). This is his latest: An Illustrated History of Urban Legends (2024).
Now, of course, I wanted the third volume to be all monsters, but urban legends is really a better fit for Boardman’s series, the previous two of which position their paranormal subjects as sort of…external manifestations of the human desire to understand that which is beyond our understanding. That’s very close to the idea, too, which I keep bringing up in these monster-related posts that humans have a keen desire for the world to be more interesting/magical/mysterious than it seems to be. In unguarded moments, we seem to indulge that desire almost unconsciously. And that’s where urban legends emerge from.
A wide range of topics is covered here, from cryptids, to conspiracy theories to weird animal encounters to the sort of horrific rumors like the one about the girl whose hair gets infested with black widow spiders at the salon or the ol’ mouse in a Coke bottle yarn. These things, in isolation, couldn’t seem any more disparate, but together in the tapestry of Boardman’s book, they create this modern mythic landscape. Go read the book and I suspect not only will the stories seem more familiar than you expect, I bet they feel a little more true, too.
And they are, just not in the boring real-world way. They’re telling us something true about our anxieties, about the modern world, about how we fit, or don’t fit. And the conclusions we all draw are probably entirely different, person to person.
Anyway, even if you don’t buy my existential ramblings, Boardman’s art continues to be sublime. Super clean lines, super straight forward compositions, but he manages to often imbue them with a heavy sense of dread or mystery despite their visual clarity. I think, as I believe I mentioned before, this is because of the sense of stillness or quiet in his work. I think that generally, quiet sets citizens of the modern world on edge.
Also, kudos for using “Killing Joke” as a section header on the creepy clowns page.
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