In the same vein, there is surely a gap in the market for fantasy wimmelbilderbucher for adults, by which I mean something akin to Richard Scarry/Where's Wally books but depicting vast, crowded scenes from fantasy settings, full of monsters, strange architecture, and weird goings-on. Each spread a single vista to be explored, whether it be a cross-section of a cave network, the inside of an archmage's tower, a forest or desert or other geographic scene, or a huge battle featuring trolls and giants and god-knows-what else. Wikipedia has a scene from a Brueghel painting postulated as an ancestor of the wimmelbilderbuch that has something of what I am talking about; picture something along these lines but with orcs and derro and it's the Underdark. That's the spread for pages 2-3, and we'll take it from there.
The webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons has some excellent panels like this. Here are a couple of good ones (spoilers, although honestly there's so much crazy shit going on, it's probably just confusing out of context):
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There are few better ways to amuse small children in art galleries than to ask them to find the scatology in a Breughel or the owl in a Bosch (the goldbugs of the Northern Renaissance?).
ReplyDeleteJason Thompson's 'walkthrough' illustrations of D&D modules come very close to what you're suggesting: and they'd be practically there if it weren't for the captions. There's a list here:
https://rendedpress.blogspot.com/2016/11/list-of-d-module-walkthrough-maps-by.html
The Glass Harmonica/Book of Weird by Barbarba Ninde Byfield comes closest, I think.
ReplyDeleteBearded Devil's massive "Hex" city illustration comes close to the Scarryesque but is more about architecture than wee people doing their thing.
the mockman.com guy was doing something like this a while ago - drawing up giant "walkthrough"-style pictures of classic D&D adventures with annotations on what happens and where.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine a bestiary of monsters arranged in a menagerie like this, as a cool front/back endpaper for a monster manual book maybe.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it I vaguely recall having a Pokémon book that did something similar.
I love Breughel, the Breughel print in my living room is my only framed picture!
ReplyDeleteFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, obviously. But yes it would be nice if there were more, and some with literary quality as well as unconnected to the big media franchises such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, and so forth.
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