Salad Fingers + Mr Peake

'oh. hello there chaps. you arrived earlier than i expected. and might i say, you are looking rather splendid this evening...'

http://www.fat-pie.com/salad.htm

'i like it when the red water comes out.

i like it when the red water comes out...'

thanks so much to Chris for pointing me in the right direction. i can't thank you enough...

brilliantly drawn, animated and voiced by David Firth. written by David Firth and Christian 'Crust' Pickup, with music by Boards of Canada and David Firth.

all the goodies are nice over at fat-pie.com:

http://www.fat-pie.com/

oh, and look...they have shirts:

http://www.cafepress.com/fatpie2

now i'm off...i must find the perfect spoon.

*

right, just wanted to add this, from the latest issue of Time Magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901061211-1565505,00.html

With a career encompassing 25 years that included five novels, a handful of plays and thousands of drawings, paintings and sketches, why isn't Mervyn Peake a more celebrated English literary and artistic hero? A cult figure today, Peake is best known for Gormenghast, his bleak but compelling gothic fantasy trilogy published in the 1940s and '50s about the hierarchy of a fictional castle, Gormenghast, and the Machiavellian machinations of its inhabitants. But he was also an accomplished illustrator, painter and war artist. "If somebody's good at everything, then they're never taken seriously, are they?" muses Chris Beetles, owner of the eponymous gallery in St. James' in London that hosted a rare exhibition of Peake's art in October.

It is precisely this failure to acknowledge Peake's breadth of talent that Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art, a new and comprehensive guide to his career, seeks to redress.

more info on the book can be found over at mervynpeake.org (run, i believe, by Mr Peake's son Sebastian Peake) here:

http://www.mervynpeake.org/artofpeake.html

click around the site for other Peake goodies.

Joel Meadows, who wrote the Time Magazine article, can be found here:

http://joelm1-joelmead.blogspot.com/

lots of interesting things on comics there as well.

i do hope this rustles up enough attention to bring more of Mr Peake's stuff to our shores. if the book doesn't hit our shores (and as an added service to Mr Peake's estate), you can order the book through Amazon.co.uk here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mervyn-Peake-Man-His-Art/dp/0720612845/sr=1-3/qid=1160122975?ie=UTF8&s=books&tag2=theestateofme-21

Mr Peake, in case you didn't know, is The Man. apart from the Titus Groan books, he also did lovely illustrations to such things as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, not to mention The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as well as some of the wisest poetry i've ever read:

The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.

-The Vastest Things are Those We May Not Learn, Mervyn Peake

and let's not forget his nonsense poems. of which, the following is (arguably) not an example:

'Each day I live in a glass room unless I break it with the thrusting of my senses and pass through the splintered walls to the great landscape.'