We are delighted to be joined by Josh O’Neill again. Josh is an author, editor and co-founder of Beehive Books. With the release of Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition from Beehive Books today, we got to chat with Josh all about the book.
Hi Josh, it is great to have you here with us again.
Thank you for having me! Please don’t pull my strings too hard.
Can you tell us about Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition from Beehive Books?
Illuminated Editions is an ongoing series of ours. We take classic works of fiction, like The Great Gatsby or Crime and Punishment and… well, we illuminate them, with illustration, essays and design. It’s a chance to see some of history’s best books through the eyes of some of today’s finest artists. And Pinocchio was a special one for us.
Pinocchio is, of course, one of the most well-known stories of all time. And yet, oddly, the actual text of Carlo Collodi’s original tale sometimes gets lost amid the cavalcade of adaptations and reimaginings. When readers encounter the original story, they are often startled – it’s extraordinarily dark, anarchic, bizarre and unique.
Mike Mignola, who is one of our favorite cartoonists and storytellers on Earth, and an artist that we’ve dreamed of working with for many years, has a deep and abiding passion for Pinocchio, tracing back to childhood. When we approached Mike about creating a book in our Illuminated Editions series, there was little doubt in his mind about what text he would like to take on.
And then Lemony Snicket came on board. We invited him to write an introduction, and he offered us something much grander, stranger, and more fitting for this singular text: a series of annotations – really short meditations – on each chapter, detailing a mortal mind’s encounter with this baffling and otherworldly creation – a case study in whether a human consciousness can survive an encounter with Pinocchio fully intact.
The notes were not simply printed in the book – they are typewritten and hand-inserted, thirty-four sheets, one per chapter, including the telltale coffee stains, ink blots, and unhinged revisions and re-revisions of an author clinging to sanity.
And finally what we wound up was this mad thing – a tome, celebrating Collodi’s remarkable and troubling story with a vast and gorgeous portfolio of illustrations from Mignola, and this whole second story layer on stuffed-in typesheets from Snicket. A strange, eerie, hilarious and gorgeous thing – as befits a text to which all of those adjectives can apply.
Could you tell us about the origins of Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition?
It began with Mike, and his passion for this book. That, and pandemic lockdowns.
We had been discussing this project with Mike for years – when the world shut down, suddenly we all had time to get it done.
Lemony Snicket came on board later, but his contributions have in a large way redefined this project – and really redefined what we can do with our Illuminated Editions series in general. This is our tenth Illuminated Edition, and it’s exciting to try something so utterly new.
What was it like working with Lemony Snicket, Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart?
A genuine joy, from top to bottom – which is probably what I’d say in public even if they were all monsters, but in this case it happens to be true.
For our series, we try to focus on illustrators with storytelling chops. We want our artists not just to illustrate scenes from a book but to take a sort of conceptual approach to how to use visuals to expand beyond the boundaries of a text. Mike, as one of the best storytellers in comics, was a perfect Illuminated Editions illustrator. And he was a pleasure to collaborate with – he went above and beyond the call, creating a huge number of illustrations, and he finished them very quickly. (Quarantining may have helped with that a little bit.)
I love how he created these sort of small frozen moments for each character – there’s something fantastically theatrical about approach, building out the world and backdrops of Collodi’s Pinocchio, and giving each performer their moment in the spotlight – a cast to be further animated by the reader’s imagination.
And Dave Stewart, of course, is the best there is – a comics legend, and a colorist working in perfect sync with Mike for decades.. So much of the mood and atmosphere of Mike’s entire Hellboy multiverse emerges from Dave’s palette, and he brought some fascinating variation on those tones to their work together here.
And I can’t say enough about working with Lemony Snicket. We asked him for something very straightforward – an intro to an edition of Pinocchio – and he took it as an invitation to play, to create, to imagine. Rather than remark directly on the text, he entered into a joyous and elaborate dance with it. His enthusiasm for the whole process, his deep love for this book – and, of course his wild untrammeled imagination and uniquely vivid wordsmithing – were such a boon to our strange little band of travelers here.
Do you have a favourite illustration from Mike for Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition?
I think my favorite is the image of the fox and the cat lurking outside the inn. It’s so charming and unsettling at the same time, like so much of Mike’s work, and like Pinocchio itself. I want to live in that world, but then I’m also not sure how long I’d last with sinister characters like that hanging around.
After you read the annotations from Lemony, what kind of feedback did you have for him?
Well, Lemony Snicket is in my opinion one of the great literary voices of our time, so predictably my main feedback was 😮😮😮.
He truly created a new style of storytelling for this project, this strange metafictional dialogue with a 140 year old text. If I had any feedback at all, it was not to resist an urge to go deeper into the weirdness and found storytelling effect of the whole thing.
I think the best thing that we were able to offer Snicket was the option to produce these notes as handmade stuffed-in typesheets. His notes are such an odd and fascinating experience, and presenting them this way allows the design to match the madness and creativity of the writing.
Was it a difficult task being the editor of Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition?
It was one of the great pleasures and privileges of my life. When you work with folks like Snicket and Mignola and Stewart, and my colleague Maelle Doliveux on design, it makes your job easy. The hardest part was keeping pace with this murderer’s row of collaborators.
Any message for the ComicBuzz readers?
Support small presses, wherever and however you can! Please. We’re desperate.
We would like to say thank you to Josh for chatting with us. We wish him and everyone involved with Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition the best of luck with the release.
