Kickstarting Dragons

April Brown and colleagues from an online comics magazine called Off Registration have prepared a comics adaptation of E. Nesbit’s The Book of Dragons.

That volume will of course include a version of “The Deliverers of Their Country,” one of my favorite examples of magical realism. The team behind this take is Jonathan Clode and Russell Hossain. According to the sample page, the artist has set the story in the present day, but the dialogue retains the original Edwardian flavor.

Brown and friends are running a Kickstarter campaign to cover printing costs, with an end date of 8 August.

“She Never Slapped Her Hippopotamus”

This is a passage from E. Nesbit’s “Uncle James, or The Purple Stranger,” a story collected in The Book of Dragons. It introduces one of the main characters, a little princess.

She was always kind to her pets. She never slapped her hippopotamus when it broke her dolls in its playful gambols, and she never forgot to feed her rhinoceroses in their little hutch in the backyard. Her elephant was devoted to her, and sometimes Mary Ann made her nurse quite cross by smuggling the dear little thing up to bed with her and letting it go to sleep with its long trunk laid lovingly across her throat…

Alas, a few paragraphs further comes an explanation that erases the visual image this passage alone provides. But it’s delightful while it lasts.

Even More Original Ice Dragon?

Apropos of ice dragons instead of fire dragons, fantasy scholar Ruth Berman tells me that E. Nesbit wrote a story called "The Ice Dragon" in her collection The Book of Dragons, also titled Seven Dragons. That tale originally snaked through the June and July 1899 issues of The Strand magazine.

A standalone edition of The Ice Dragon was published in 1988, with pictures by Carol Gray. Though the text is in the public domain, the only free version I could find on the web is this audio download, which requires registration.

E. Nesbit: magical realism before its time

In a discussion of "magic(al) realism" on an email list in March and more recently in another on Child_Lit, I opined that all the traits that define that literary style (aside from continental origin) can be found in E. Nesbit's short story "The Deliverers of Their Country", published in 1899. [Actually, I called that story "The Saviours of Their Country," so proud that I'd spelled the second word in the English way. Oh, well.]

On Child_Lit Leda Schubert posted one definition of "magic realism," from Herbert Kohl's From Archetype to Zeitgeist (1992):

Magic realism is the name given to a style of writing that has emerged in fiction written over the past twenty-five years in Central and South America [i.e., since 1967]. The style is characterized by a jarring juxtaposition of magical and strange occurrences described in ordinary and detailed descriptive language. Magic realism does not try to make the strange seem special or mystical, but rather matter-of-fact and part of everyday reality. The Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-), one of the leading creators of this style, once said in an interview that attention to the concrete details of the magical event created the belief in magic as ordinary and within the world that is essential to this style. He gave an example of elephants flying through the sky, and said that one wrote that there were twenty-two elephants flying by instead of merely that there were elephants flying by, because that detail infused the magic with enough reality to draw the reader in.

Obviously Nesbit wrote in England about a hundred years ago, and not in Latin America forty years ago. But otherwise, how does her story meet this definition's main criterion of making the strange seem "matter-of-fact and part of everyday reality" through "attention to the concrete details"?

It all began with Effie's getting something in her eye. It hurt very much indeed, and it felt something like a red-hot spark--only it seemed to have legs as well, and wings like a fly. Effie rubbed and cried--not real crying, but the kind your eye does all by itself without your being miserable inside your mind--and then she went to her father to have the thing in her eye taken out. Effie's father was a doctor, so of course he knew how to take things out of eyes; he did it very cleverly with a soft paintbrush dipped in castor-oil. When he had got the thing out, he said:--

"This is very curious." Effie had often got things in her eye before, and her father had always seemed to think it was natural--rather tiresome and naughty perhaps, but still natural. He had never before thought it curious. She stood holding her handkerchief to her eye, and said:--

"I don't believe it's out." People always say this when they have had something in their eyes.

"Oh, yes--it's out," said the doctor--"here it is on the brush. This is very interesting."

Effie had never heard her father say that about anything that she had any share in. She said "What!"

The doctor carried the brush very carefully across the room, and held the point of it under his microscope--then he twisted the brass screws of the microscope, and looked through the top with one eye.

"Dear me," he said. "Dear, dear me! Four well-developed limbs; a long caudal appendage; five toes, unequal in length, almost like one of the Lacertidae, yet there are traces of wings." The creature under his eye wriggled a little in the castor-oil, and he went on: "Yes; a bat-like wing. A new specimen, undoubtedly. Effie, run round to the professor and ask him to be kind enough to step in for a few minutes."

"You might give me sixpence, daddy," said Effie, "because I did bring you the new specimen. I took great care of it inside my eye; and my eye does hurt."

Lots of matter-of-fact, concrete detail about what turns out to be a dragon. Enjoy the rest of the story here, or check out the Lisbeth Zwerger picture book.