After all, the opportunity to become a “pig-e-phant” doesn’t come around every day. An ear pulled here and an extra eye placed there, and before you can shake a carving stick, a spurt of frenetic self-exploration-expressed as a tangled black scribble-reveals a succession of smug hybrid beasts. The owl is pleased, but the wolf convinces it that the best is yet to come. The hands disappear, leaving the friends to their own devices. A pair of hands descends, and soon, amid a flurry of squishing and prodding and poking and sculpting, a handsome gray wolf and a stately brown owl emerge. The gray anticipates an adventure, while the brown appears apprehensive. Reinvention is the name of the game for two blobs of clay.Ī blue-eyed gray blob and a brown-eyed brown blob sit side by side, unsure as to what’s going to happen next. Wonderful squiggly line, patches of green and brown, gold and blue and fabulous use of negative white space make this a joy to reread.

The resolutely genderless depiction of the child may have some readers gasping at the end and going back to the beginning-not a bad outcome at all. So do the kid and the puppy, and the end finds a bird dropping a seed on the dog’s offspring’s head and. Nightmares cause the child to submit to shearing, however, after which pup and child plant the sapling. But the little plant wilts! An umbrella keeps the sun off, then child and pup try to water it (the bedtime shower works best). A bird drops a seed, which begins to grow in the child’s hair. The child, however, has other ideas and runs out to frolic in the grass with an equally bouncy puppy. A mop-headed child faces a momlike figure with scissors in her hands-definitely time for a haircut.

He knocked both out of the park and now he's tasked with this odd-ball title.A curious, curiously subversive and very pretty wordless Australian import. 'Gerald's Game' was thought unfilmable for a long time because almost the entire story takes place in the mind of a woman handcuffed to a bed and 'Doctor Sleep' had the impossible task of bringing together Stephen King's world and Stanley Kubrick's iconic cinematic (if not terribly faithful) adaptation. The interesting thing about Mike Flanagan is he seems to specialize in adapting notoriously difficult-to-adapt King properties. Interestingly enough, Darren Aronofsky's production company, Protozoa Pictures, was the first to option this story, although it seems their option lapsed and King has now trusted it to Flanagan after the success of his previous adaptations, 'Gerald's Game' and 'Doctor Sleep.' When we meet him he's dying and the story goes backward from there, all the way back to his childhood and his relationship with his grandparents, including his ghost-seeing grandpa. The story is told in three stages, one stage is a world on the brink of collapse and you don't know why and in parallel is the story of Chuck.

Leaf by stephen michael king