JABBERWOCKY

A young hero takes on a truly humongous monster in the late Santore’s final, probably, and most melodramatic set of illustrations.

Nobly posed in a three-quarter-length portrait at the beginning, the White-presenting hero looks more wiry than ripped for all his bare chest and granite jaw—not the most likely sort to stand a chance against the immense, slavering, crocodilian beast that pounces in the climactic double gatefold. Still, one hack of the jeweled vorpal blade later, the creature’s minivan-sized head lies in a pool of gore. (How the hero contrives to go galumphing back with it is left to the imagination, as in the next scene he’s already raising his arms in triumph amid a cloud of parrotlike slithy toves to a chortled offstage “Callooh! Callay!”) Being positively crowded with artfully detailed tortoises, sundials, and badgerlike creatures with long, pointy noses, the dim and mossy tulgey wood makes a properly surreal setting; for extra monster thrills the artist inserts separate outsized views of the likewise slavering Bandersnatch, part boar and part tiger, and a fantastically plumed and toothy Jubjub bird that looks as if it could have a T. rex for breakfast. In his note the artist discusses his approach to the nonsense poem and properly echoes Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in encouraging readers to realize that “the words mean what they sound.”

’Tis a brillig sendoff; fans of all things toothy and terrifying will gyre and gimble in its wabe.