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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Article: Isabel Greenberg - The Encyclopedia of Everything
Posted: September 19, 2013
The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is sure to confound librarians. It’s not a learned encyclopedia at all, but a playful yet wise debut graphic novel, in which Isabel Greenberg rewrites humankind’s origins. In her appendices she claims to document an unrecorded period pre-dating the Permian and Mesozoic Eras, before the first reptiles, when our planet had three moons, and a civilisation of which no trace survives, except for some supposed ‘incredible subterranean cave paintings’.
From cave art it’s a relatively short jump to comics art. Illustrated in woodcut-like black ink accented in grey and sporadic colours, Greenberg’s stories feel familiar but quirkily altered, because she builds them from her researches into legends, world religions and folklore. As she explains, “I liked how many of their themes were universal - competitive siblings, jealous lovers, childless parents, parentless children - and crop up over and over, because they are fundamentally human.” Read the rest of my Article and see Isabel’s new strip for ArtReview here…
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
