Happy Edward Gorey Week!

The icy tingle-touch of Edward Gorey’s influence is inescapable. This past Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of Gorey's birth, and the scope of his influence still continues to grow. Despite the shortcomings of not being British alongside the handicap of being alive during all of the 2nd half of the 20th century, Gorey’s bite has throughly sunk into the tone of our culture with the respect and ubiquity of an Oscar Wilde-themed chain of gas stations. 

His decades of book covers, illustrations, comics and set design (among plenty else) splash through both bookstores and Broadway, entering our homes through television title sequences and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, ever-present, having remained in print since 1963.

Gorey’s work silences our thought tornadoes with the reassurance that ennui is inevitable, providing company for our misery, dressed in the endless texture of pretty and grimy broken lines. Gorey's stories give our children a place to go when they're battling with the knowledge of death, a cozy nook to explore crisis and creepiness.

Edward Gorey's place is not as a cartoonists' cartoonist- his stories sneak too easily onto library and bookstore shelves, placing his work in that slim genre as work part of the mainstream without suffering from feeling watered-down. Can you even imagine your world without him? What would be in the shelves of Hot Topic? What would Tim Burton be doing for a living? Without Gorey's sensibility, Wes Anderson’s body of work melts into little more than a Fantasia Lights cigarette smoldering in a bakelite ashtray while a Kinks b-side plays on a cardboard turntable. Cute, to be sure- but perhaps not really worth the calories. 

All week on TCJ we're celebrating the work of Edward Gorey with reviews, essays and articles from the archives, starting today with an account from contributor Cynthia Rose about his role as her childhood penpal, all dedicated to you, our own RDP.

 

 

 

 

 

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