Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night

    (HarperCollins, 2003)
™ and ©2003 HarperCollins

The third edition of Raw’s Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly is actually more wonderful than the first two, if that’s possible.

For starters, each story in this edition hangs together more consistently and thematically than those in the previous editions, although each of the 12 stories presented here is still unusual and wildly creative in its own right.

Here, each of the contributors — which includes the likes of Neil Gaiman, Gahan Wilson, Lemony Snicket, William Joyce, Tony Millionaire, and even Martin Handford (of Where’s Waldo?) — is given a single sentence, “It was a dark and silly night,” from which to start their story. But where they go from there is up to them. And it’s a blast for the reader to follow along. Snicket and artist Richard Sala lead off with a delightfully self-fulfilling tale of Yetis and curious children, while Gaiman and Wilson tell the story of a kids’ party in an unlikely and deliciously ghoulish place.

As a pre-Halloween treat, readers couldn’t ask for better, especially since Spiegelman and Mouly throw in a classic 1950s story from the late master Basil Wolverton. His zany character Jumpin’ Jupiter more than fills the dark and silly night requirements of the editors.

— Stephen C. George
Jump to issue:
  NotesWriterArtist