Voynich Manuscript and comics / graphic novels...

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-manuscript-and-comics-graphic-novels on Cipher Mysteries

I try to pick up on everything VMs-related out there, and I liked comics as a kid (Marvel not DC, if you're askin'): so it came as a nice surprise to find the Voynich Manuscript popping up on the edges of the comics world.

According to this page on his own website, satirical graphics novel author Steve Aylett placed the VMs "in the Juice Museum" (a location in "The Velocity Gospel", #2 in his Accomplice series), as well as "in Eddie Gamete's library in Slaughtermatic". Sadly, thanks to H.G.Wells, David Bowie, Peter Frampton, Topper Headon, and Aleister Crowley, Steve's unlikely to ever make it into the list of Five Most Famous People From Bromley: but I'm sure he'll do OK for himself all the same. :-o

Another comics blogger has the VMs on the brain, mentioning it in a nice little article on the rediscovery of a full-length print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (it mentions the funky Superman's Metropolis story, too), as well as in an article on its own.

But then again, I suppose the Codex Seraphinianus is very much like a graphic novel in its own odd way, and that's arguably not so very far from the VMs: if you can't read the text, all you have left is the pictures, right? John C commented that the Codex Seraphinianus "most closely resembles European fantasy works like those one sees from Roland Topor and various bande desinée artists": but to be honest, I'm pretty sure that Serafini was simply trying to appropriate (and undermine) the visual tropes of instruction manuals, rather than align himself with any art movement or style.

Finally (and apropos of nothing, I just thought you might like it), here - courtesy of yesbutnobutyes.com - is a classic Captain America frame, that got terribly, terribly lost in the translation to, erm, English. Enjoy!

Codex Seraphinianus on Flickr...

If you haven't seen Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus before, I heartily recommend stomping over to this 230-photo Flickr set and checking it out.

It's now reasonably well-known that the book's strange page-numbering system has been cracked (it's a funny kind of base-21 counting, with various unlucky numbers removed), but the text itself remains enigmatic. Ivan Derzhanski has posted some observations here, but I think it's fair to say nobody yet has the foggiest idea how to go about trying to read it. Oh well!

Incidentally, there's even a ballet based on it!

"The Spiderwick Chronicles" and the VMs...

You may not have heard of them, but the six books in The Spiderwick Chronicles - stories that follow a group of kids in their everyday struggles with elves, goblins and boggarts - have (according to a piece in this week's MCV, which seemed to have been written by Vivendi's PR folk) sold six million copies worldwide, more than a million of which were in the UK. Oh, and the US box office release of the movie grossed nearly $25m: and there's a computer game imminent, too.

LA-based blogger Martin van Velsen caught the film's opening: and was struck by the title-sequence, during which Arthur Spiderwick constructs a book, one page every day, by gluing down small objects and animal (mostly insect) parts and writing a commentary around them. Martin wonders if the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript (both of which he describes as "pure works of fiction, a flight of fantasy out of control... [yet] based... on the real world") were effectively the real Spiderwick Chronicles.

"When browsing the Voynich Manuscript I tend to find myself wonder what was drawn true to life and what was made up. More importantly, did the author deliberately stay on the edge as to lure the reader into believing some of the imaginary depictions are actually real?"

All good thoughts. He ends his blog with a rather splendid quote from H. P. Lovecraft:-

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

This whole blog entry warmed my heart, simply because here we have a blogger who really gets the Voynich. OK, he's into H. P. Lovecraft and Luigi Serafini too, so it wasn't a massive jump sideways: but all credit to him regardless. :-)