The Envious Siblings: and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes

by Landis Blair

Overview

Eight gleefully macabre rhyming vignettes by an award-winning comics artist, as delightful as they are deadly.

Inspired by the dark imagination of Edward Gorey, Envious Siblings is a twisted and hauntingly funny debut. Comics artist Landis Blair interweaves absurdist horror and humor into brief, rhyming vignettes at once transgressive and hilarious. In Blair’s surreal universe, a lost child watches as bewhiskered monsters gobble up her fellow train passengers; a band of kids merrily plays a gut-churning game with playground toys; and two sisters, grinning madly, tear each other apart. These charmingly perverse creations take ordinary settings—a living room, a subway car, a playground—and spin them in a nightmarish direction.

Envious Siblings heralds a brilliant new cartooning talent, and will captivate readers who have thrilled to the lurid fantasies of Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake, Charles Addams, Shel Silverstein, and Tim Burton.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393651621
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Landis Blair illustrated the prize-winning graphic novel The Hunting Accident and the New York Times bestseller From Here to Eternity, and has published illustrations in the New York Times, Chicago magazine, and Medium. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Editorial Reviews

08/12/2019

Blair (The Hunting Accident) unveils a gruesome collection of eight repellent Gothic faux–nursery rhymes. Each tale follows anachronistic youths along their sinister, often violent paths. “The Malicious Playground” stars a gaggle of children who gleefully torture one another at recess, while “Honourable Beasts” features a young girl enticed by gentlemanly wild animals to join them for dinner—where her mother is to be eaten. Blair wears his adoration for Edward Gorey and Tim Burton on his sleeve, but it never moves past homage; some segments are difficult to evaluate beyond their riffs on Gorey originals (his monster-infested “Awful Underground,” for instance, closely recalls elements of “The Wuggly Ump”) with the gross-out factor dialed up. Blair’s skill is evident, but there’s an overall flatness to his cross-hatched preening figures. Though some of his poetry elicits a chuckle or a startled gasp, Blair’s debut solo collection mostly mirrors his inspirations, drenched in shock value. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Good grief, Landis, this is a bit gruesome."

Eddie Campbell

"Rarely have I seen an artist whose crosshatched phantasms are more evocative or more disturbing. Landis Blair weaves a world of dark discontents that is as disquieting as it is addictive."

Emil Ferris

"Landis Blair is a singular, morbid talent."

Caitlin Doughty

"[D]eranged and funny. … It’s like if Edward Gorey stopped playing nice."

Hayley Campbell

"[A]n entertaining embrace of the dark side of humor from a rising talent in cartooning."

Danielle Ballantyne

"The Envious Siblings gave me the fantods, in the nicest possible way."

Audrey Niffenegger

"[A] devilishly funny debut."

STARBURST Magazine - Fred McNamara

08/01/2019

Cartoonist Blair (The Hunting Accident) presents this collection of eight twisted vignettes that range from the totally absurd to the gleefully macabre. In one, children with devious smiles plastered across their faces happily mangle one another with playground equipment before growing bored and turning on their father. Another features a little girl who is beginning to grow suspicious that her parents might not be telling her the truth about how her older sister became a skeleton. Other stories follow feuding siblings who hack one another limb by limb, a pack of stylishly dressed wild animals determined to lure a little girl out through her bedroom window to join them for dinner, and a group of insects throwing a raucous party atop a human cadaver. All but one story—that of a child who wanders into the subway and watches as hideous monsters gradually replace her fellow passengers—are told in light rhyming verse. VERDICT The influence of Quentin Blake, Tim Burton, and especially Edward Gorey is clear, but the combination of surreal comedy and imagery far more horrific than any ever created by the artists by whom he was obviously inspired set Blair apart and result in an audacious and entertaining compilation.

Library Journal