the upside down world of gustave verbeek

There he created three weirdly novel comics: 'The Upside Downs of Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo' (1903-1905), which still remains unequaled, 'Terrors of the Tiny Tads' (1905) and 'The Loony Lyrics of Lulu' (1910), about the monster-hunt of a crazy professor and his niece, Lulu. Verbeck did illustration work for McClure's, Harper's, American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, before joining the staff of the New York Herald. While the cartoonist used both names to sign his work, he most commonly went by 'Verbeck' while his children chose to use the 'Verbeek' spelling. Drawn towards the Cabaret du Chat Noir, Gustave Verbeck designed a shadow play titled 'Le Malin Kangourou', and in 1893/1894, he created several illustrations for the newspaper Le Chat Noir.Īround 1900, Gustave Verbeck moved to the United States, where an immigration officer misspelled his name as 'Verbeek'. He started his cartooning and illustration career working for several European newspapers. Verbeck grew up in Japan, but left to study art in Paris.

He was the fourth child of Dutch/Belgian missionary Guido Verbeck, who became headmaster of a school in Tokyo that later became Japan's Imperial University. The story features a river, a log, a drowning young lady with a large feather in her hat, and a golden-egg-laying goose.Gustave Verbeck was born in Nagasaki, Japan. Verbeek cleverly uses the fable, though, in setting up the unlikely plot for this story.

Actually, not much more than the title and the existence of a golden-egg laying goose relates to the traditional GGE fable. All the stories feature Lovekins and Muffaroo one is the other when you turn them upside down. I need these instructions at the mid-points and endings of the stories. The twenty-four page pamphlet includes very helpful instructions on where to go next. The stories are here reproduced for the first time in their original color. For sixty-four straight weeks starting in 1903 Verbeek produced a story in six panels that continued as the reader followed the panels again in reverse order upside down. As the introduction points out, they pay tribute to one of the most unusual minds to offer illustrated stories. I was amazed to find what I thought was GGE among the four stories in this pamphlet found in one of the three or four bookshops I found in Greenwich. I had encountered topsy-turvy books before, and they may well have come from Verbeek (once known as Verbeck).

Here is one of the strangest books I have found for this collection.

The upside down world of gustave verbeek