There was a copy of the December 2008 National Geographic in my dentist's waiting room; inside, there was an article about Herod the Great by Tom Mueller, which included this:

An astute and generous ruler, a brilliant general, and one of the most imaginative and energetic builders of the ancient world, Herod guided his kingdom to new prosperity and power. Yet today he is best known as the sly and murderous monarch of Matthew's Gospel, who slaughtered every male infant in Bethlehem in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the newborn Jesus, the prophesied King of the Jews. During the Middle Ages he became an image of the Antichrist: Illuminated manuscripts and Gothic gargoyles show him tearing his beard in mad fury and brandishing his sword at the luckless infants, with Satan whispering in his ear. Herod is almost certainly innocent of this crime, of which there is no report apart from Matthew's account. But children he certainly slew, including three of his own sons, along with his wife, his mother-in-law, and numerous other members of his court. Throughout his life, he blended creativity and cruelty, harmony and chaos, in ways that challenge the modern imagination.

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Last fall, I picked up a copy of Paris, a graphic novel by Andi Watson and Simon Gane about a painter named Juliet who meets a socialite named Deborah and... I finally got to it a couple nights ago. You can view a copy of the cover at Boston Bibliophile, and her review's pretty much on target, IMO. There's also more about the story and its creation, and some more images from it, in a 2005 interview at comicbookresources.com.

I was thinking about the art while at the dentist, and it occurred to me that I'm drawn to it in part because it reminds me of the Silver Burdett songbooks used by my grade-school music teachers -- the funky angles and bold lines bring back to mind some of the illustrations (almost woodcut-like) from that series, which I think was published in the late 1960s or early 1970s (I've got a dilapidated, coverless copy somewhere in the house, and Aaron Copland is listed as one of the consultants). Whereas thin lines and elegant curves tend to make me think of Lucille Corcos (the illustrator of the 1941 Gilbert and Sullivan treasury) and Al Hirshfeld, and there's yet another style of quasi-cartoon that I associate with pre-1960s language textbooks. (Can't quite come up with a generalization about it at the moment -- one of those know-it-when-I-see-it things.)

It's got me thinking again about how visual vocabularies are developed. One of the most eye-opening (so to speak) articles I came across last year was Margaret O'Connell's Why Is Manga and Anime Characters' Hair All the Colors of the Rainbow? Part 4: When Is a Blond Not a Blond? (a/k/a, why characters that look blonde to me in the black-and-white art are described (and colorized) as brunettes and vice versa; a/k/a, I have a such a long, long way to go when it comes to parsing illustrations.

Mind, I feel that way about pretty much everything these days. Then again, there's what Hokusai said. So, back to work.