MOBY-DICK ILLUSTRATED

I'm illustrating and publishing an edition of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Rice Boy Comics / Wizard of Oz / Illustration / Patreon

[evandahm]

The THIRD book of my webcomic series Vattu is finally available in print, with Topatoco. Really happy with how it turned out!!!

I’m mere days from finishing work on Island Book 2, and then will get back to updating Vattu online– now into its FINAL BOOK, and things are really starting to come together. Hope you can follow along!!! thank y’all

[evandahm]

My etsy story is back up! A handful of originals from various projects will be available for the next several weeks.

[mobydickillustrated]

Here it is! Done.

A very limited number of the 12x18 screenprinted posters are available too.

A huge amount of development material, and other photos of the finished book are available throughout this blog. Thank you everyone for following and encouraging me through this process!

[mobydickillustrated]

This book will be available for sale on Monday in my Topatoco store!

[evandahm]

I recently finished a big series of illustrations for Moby-Dick, and I’m currently running a Kickstarter campaign to self-publish an illustrated edition of the book (but also, you can read the book for free any time you like). I’m going to use this as an excuse to add to the pile of writing about one of the most written-about books in history: a book that is pored over and analyzed and cross-referenced as if it were scripture.

I am obsessed with this book: as a story and as an unfashionable, aggressive effort, and as an articulation of an interest I have in humanity’s confrontation with the limits of itself and its understanding. I am only lately and by the light of this book seeing that particular throughline connecting a lot of the stories I’ve been preoccupied with throughout my life. It’s a good book to get obsessed with, and to build an overambitious, impractical project on the back of.

Moby-Dick wasn’t well-received in the 1850s, was out of print by the end of Melville’s life, and seems to have been thought of at the time as a major turning point in his career: a once-successful writer at first known for his popular and commercially-viable adventure novels who turned instead to chase, monomaniacally, this weird, encyclopedic, metaphysical story about an apocalyptic whaling voyage.

It was decades after Melville’s death that the book began accruing its reputation as an Undisputed Classic, and that reputation is still kind of hard to believe: Moby-Dick is every bit as structurally unusual, disjointed, misleading, and disturbing now as it must have seemed in 1850. It isn’t a book to be nodded over and politely accepted as Great. It’s aggressive and grotesque and blasphemous.

I don’t mean blasphemous in a religious sense (though it is that, too), but more broadly: a central argument that I see Moby-Dick making is that reality and objective truth are categorically inaccessible to us. This truth is the rot at the heart of every fundamentalism and every monomania. That the world is truly known is the lie on which the entire modern world is built.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough.

The chapter CETOLOGY is about the point where Moby-Dick’s initial pretense at being a straightforward adventure story is irrevocably broken, and it’s the point where I’ve heard more than one person saying they’ve given up on reading it. It is a kind of grueling chapter, and maybe consciously so: the narrator (nominally, but increasingly nebulously, a man named Ishmael) outlines his own new categorical system for making sense of different species of whale, in opposition to that of mainstream science, which is only lately coming to terms with the idea (ridiculous on its face) that a whale is a mammal.

The narrator’s categories are based on standard book sizes: the folio, the octavo, and the duodecimo. A book is an artifact designed for maximum intelligibility. Every inch of a book is artificial; every letter is put in its place by a guiding intelligence; it is meant to be read by a human and understood fully in the terms of humanity. The whale is in no way like a book. The whale is violent but amoral. The meaning of the carven “hieroglyphics” that mark the entire body of the whale is not simply beyond you: it is absent.

A reading of this chapter as a satire of humanity’s flimsy attempts to make sense of the world around it has become key to my understanding of the book’s relationship to the unknown and the unknowable. It’s funnier and makes its point even better, I think, in the context of 21st century readers smugly assured that the whale is not a fish, and that the book’s understanding of mainstream cetology is hopelessly incorrect: that we now see the world as it really is, not like those ignorant 19th-century people. To think this is to make the same mistake Melville mocks in this chapter.

For all our labels and our categorization how much do we know? We may know a lot, and we certainly know more than did any writer in 1850. But what inappropriate license do we grant ourselves on the premise that we know everything?

I see in Moby-Dick an elaborate, operatic condemnation of this surety that is the driving force of Ahab’s suicidal journey. Though the book is dense with Christian language and imagery, it articulates a sort of atheism as a counterpoint to fundamentalism in all its forms. Ishmael, after all, is the only survivor: the one figure untethered to belief and reverence.

This atheism isn’t the one lately associated with the word, which flatly and uncritically substitutes a scientistic surety for a scriptural-literalist one. It’s an atheism of God and of any pernicious substitute for him: any implicit belief that the world is intelligible, or that it ought to be. The unknowable isn’t so because it’s categorically transcendent, but just because it is indifferent to us.

Where would the answers to our questions be, anyway? How could we ever access whatever transcendent space—religious/metaphysical or objective/scientific—where those answers could be pointed to?

This preposterous whale-chase, and this preposterous industry (outmoded not long after the publication of Moby-Dick and looked on with disgust in 2016) can be taken as a symbol for our entire modern, industrialized, capitalist world. We have driven ourselves with our surety to the edge of economic and ecological collapse every bit as bluntly foreshadowed as the Pequod disaster.

It is not just Ahab that dooms the ship, but his crew, too. The crew of the Pequod can see what’s coming, but their power is hemmed-in within a dense protocol that allows no resistance. And every one of them is there in desperation: in a struggle to make a living for themselves, to have something to send back home, or to keep themselves from suicide. They are working people, disenfranchised and marginalized people with no means of appeal. Starbuck, the first mate, makes an impassioned resistance, but abandons it for the sake of order and civility.

“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”

Ahab dooms the ship, and the crew can see what’s coming. In Ahab’s quest to slay his own personal avatar of the unknowable and to substantiate his desperate extremism, he kills them all. No one objects.

[mobydickillustrated]

This book will be available very soon. Here’s why I love Moby-Dick, if you didn’t see this post earlier!

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An e-book edition of Moby-Dick Illustrated is available now here!

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Just got the fully-bound final proof of this thing, and here is what it looks like.

Coming VERY SOON. I’m very happy to finally see this thing in person.

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More proof materials for the book! I have sent some money to the printer; book is in production! I will have an ETA for u all soon! xoxo

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Got one last proofing item for the book: an unbound cover with the title stamped on the spine as it’ll be on the finished books! Looks good I think

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Got a blank dummy version of the Moby-Dick illustrated book! To get an idea of the size and binding. It's beautiful and huge. The only thing printed on the white cover will be the title in black on the spine.

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Hey, I've just discovered your Moby-Dick project and it looks absolutely lovely! I missed the kickstarter, so can I buy the book after the campaign's end? When will it be available? Thanks!

The book will be available for sale in the Spring sometime! I will make a lot of noise here when that happens!

[mobydickillustrated]

The Kickstarter for my illustrated edition of Moby-Dick is ending in a couple of hours. We are over goal, so this book is going to print right away as soon as the Kickstarter money lands!

This was a very new kind of project for me, and ended up being an enormous and maybe over-ambitious thing to try to do, so it’s wonderful to see that it resonates. Thank you so much for your support.

[mobydickillustrated]

Moby-Dick Illustrated REACHED GOAL on Kickstarter last night! So these books are going to happen, and there’s 48 hours left to preorder a copy. Thank you for helping make this book possible!!!!!

Also because there’s been some confusion on this point, I want to clarify: all of the work on the contents of this book is finished. All 53 illustrations and all of the typesetting (preview). We are already talking to the printer and will be ready to go within two weeks of the Kickstarter ending. It will take a few months to receive the books in the United States! But this process will move along as quickly as possible as soon as the Kickstarter ends.

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A few of the illustrations I made for Moby-Dick are two-page spreads, and here they are, including the frontispiece and the map at the end of the book. All illustrations are full-bleed (printed to the edge of the page), which I think works well with the jarring, shadowy quality I was going for.

FOUR DAYS LEFT to preorder this book! Almost to goal. Thanks everyone!

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Just a few days left on my Moby-Dick illustrated Kickstarter! I wanted to post some examples of the many many other people who have illustrated Moby-Dick in whole or in part; here are a bunch I have found and liked. Artists listed here in order of illustrations:

A. Burnham Shute was, as far as I can tell, the first illustrator of the novel, in an 1892 edition 41 years after its original publication.

Rockwell Kent produced over 100 ink illustrations for the 1920s edition of Moby-Dick that is considered the beginning of its wider appreciation. Really incredible work. Editions with Kent’s illustrations are still easy to find.

Raymond Bishop illustrated an edition in 1930 with woodcuts.

Anton Otto Fischer illustrated an edition in color and black and white in the 1930s.

Robert Shore illustrated an edition in the 60s. Black and white frantic, messy imagery. Really love these.

Mead Schaeffer illustrated an edition in the 70s, I think? All in color.

Barry Moser did a series of woodcuts for an edition by Arion Press in 1979. All handset type and two-color printing; beautiful edition.

Matt Kish drew a different illustration for every single page of Moby-Dick in 2015. Disorienting, psychedelic stuff. He did the same with Heart of Darkness in 2012.

Tony Millionaire illustrated the cover of a recent Penguin edition.

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Here’s some examples of scrimshaw, a craft practiced on whaleships and mentioned in Moby-Dick. The first two images here are carved on sperm whale teeth.

Scrimshaw and 1800s commercial illustration were my main referents in developing the densely-hatched style for the illustrations of my edition of Moby-Dick. There is LESS THAN ONE WEEK LEFT if you want to preorder that book, and we’re not to goal yet!

Thank you!

[mobydickillustrated]

This illustration is available as a 12 by 18 inch screenprint in white ink on black paper, through the Moby-Dick illustrated Kickstarter! Probably my favorite illustration of the series??

One week left, almost to goal.