Don't mistake this gorgeous and wholly original book for a
blow-by-blow comic-book-style retelling of
Moby-Dick. What artist Matt Kish has done is
create one drawing for and inspired by each page of Melville's 552-page
masterpiece (for the record, the Signet Classics version). The result is less a
story and more a cabinet of visual and literary curiosities. Each image—rendered
in ink, colored pencil or paint—is accompanied by a single exquisite
line from the novel, such as "But high above the flying scud and
dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight from which beamed
forth an angel's face" or "Thus, while in life the great whale's body
may have been a real terror to his foes, in death his ghost becomes a powerless
panic to a world."
Only the most devoted Moby-Dick fans will need to read the whole
creation sequentially. The rest of us will dip in and out, enjoying the
interplay of the insanely beautiful words and images (my favorite, on page 346,
is an anatomical drawing of a whale in vivid reds, blues and black) and
examining the connection between the two. The most solid and compelling
narrative may actually be in the introduction, in which Kish describes not only
his lifelong love for the original novel but also his lack of formal artistic
education and the only place he had to work, "a closet that measures about
three feet wide by six deep" inside of which he made 500 drawings. Even if
you don't enjoy the book, let it sit on your coffee table as testament to what
all of us human beings can do if we stick with it—and believe in the
great white whale of what we are doing.
