Saturday, March 31, 2007

This is not a comic book...



...but it should be.

That image is from the cover of Diane Goode's children's book The Dinosaur's New Clothes, a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes. With dinosaurs.

In other words, it's a work of pure genius.

Goode sets her version in an alternate dimension where dinosaurs lived in Versailles, and the emperor role is played by a Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing a powdered wig.

I laugh every single time I see that image above (I think it's the look on his face that does it). And there's a different picture of the Tyrannosaur wearing a different powdered wig and diffeernt outrageous outfit, making that same weird face, on almost every single page of the book.

At least until the end, when two trickster tailors convince him to wear their outfit made from "invisible fabric." With his pea-sized brain, he of course falls for it and it tricked into walking naked in front of all his courtiers.

My sole disappointment in this work was that there was that it didn't end with the emperor biting the heads off of the tricksters, two much smaller and weaker dinosaurs (one was an Iguandadon, and I forget what the other one was...I think it was one of those smaller egg-eating ones that I can never pronounce the names of).

But then, despite my love of powdered wigs and dinosaurs, I'm not the target audience for this book.

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