(++++) MIXING REAL WITH SURREAL

Wondrous Animals: Color a Kingdom of Creatures. By Kerby Rosanes. Plume. $16.

     The hyper-detailed drawings of Kerby Rosanes look wonderful in black-and-white, which makes his many coloring books for adults worth paging through again and again, even for readers who do not have coloristic tendencies. For those who do want to unleash their inner artist, of course, the books provide innumerable opportunities to do just that, with the extreme detail of the art offering more-than-ample chances to make Rosanes’ creations look realistic, or hyper-realistic, or deliberately unrealistic.

     The original art spans multiple categories itself, which can be a bit unsettling, as it is in the latest Rosanes collection, Wondrous Animals. What Rosanes has done here is offer selections from six earlier books: Animorphia, Imagimorphia, Mythomorphia, Geomorphia, Worlds within Worlds, and Fragile World. As the first four titles make clear, “morphing” – the change-through-blending of one thing to another – is a significant part of some of this art, as when the bars of a bird cage bend like living foliage and become the tails of birds that are gratefully flying free and away from cage life. But what makes Wondrous Animals unusual is that in addition to surreal scenes like that one, the book is sprinkled with entirely realistic and beautifully rendered portrayals of actual animals, such as a mother and baby koala on one page, and a two-page spread of axolotls (which only seem to be creatures of fantasy) elsewhere.

     Facing pages taken from different books, and thus from different worlds, can be particularly surprising, even jarring: the koalas are on a right-hand page, for example, while the left-hand one shows what could be a phoenix arising into new life; elsewhere, a right-hand page shows beautifully rendered bats in flight, while the left-hand one shows a stag staring straight out of the book, its magnificent antlers encompassing and morphing into the two halves of a miniature village, complete with windmill and church and a bridge allowing the unseen inhabitants to cross from one side to the other.

     The result of juxtapositions like these is that Rosanes not only blurs the line between reality and surreality but also makes it seem as if his impossible creations could exist in the same world as his portrayals of real creatures. In scenes created with Rosanes’ offbeat sense of humor, that feeling is especially strong: one left-hand page very accurately shows tiny, huge-eyed frogs amid foliage, while the right-hand one features two beautifully rendered chameleons – one of which has its tail curled around a tiny treasure chest, and both of which share their arboreal space with mysterious and mischievous-looking little semi-animate critters that could be sprites or woodland spirits or something else worth looking in the eye if one happens to encounter them (as one chameleon is looking right at one of the whatever-they-are things).

     Seeing the sheer variety of these who-knows-what critters is one thing that makes paging through Wondrous Worlds so enjoyable, whether or not one chooses to color the little beings. Rosanes does not hesitate to include a three-eyed bipedal alien, a boom box with arms and big eyes, a sort-of ghost with a parasol, an alligator-ish being wearing a crown, and an eight-legged-four-horned something-or-other with an old-fashioned rabbit-eared TV set as adjuncts to a two-page spread of facing swans whose heads and necks are as real-looking as their environment is peculiar. On the other hand, a different two-page spread is an underwater display featuring three manatees as well as fish, sea turtles, jellyfish and other swimming creatures – all shown with exquisite detail and entirely realistically.

     Wondrous Worlds, plural, is, as the title indicates, taken from various places that Rosanes has created. In this combination, those multiple worlds create a single one that is all the stranger for the way it mixes the real and fully identifiable with the cannot-possibly-exist with the that-almost-looks-as-if-it-could-be-real. The multiple worlds from which these pages come have here morphed into a single, highly multifaceted and variegated world – one that readers can accentuate even further by creating their own color palettes to differentiate the multiple types of creatures portrayed, or to show, through coloration, ways in which perhaps the real and surreal are not actually far apart at all.