Post by hengest on Jul 31, 2021 23:59:58 GMT -5
Tales of the Beanworld is a comic book by Larry Marder. It ran through much of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, as I recall. It was about the lives of a tride of anthropomorphic beans (you heard me). You learn about their usual ways of doing things when something disrupts them. Their lives are centered on getting food, visual art, and music. Over the series their way of live gets more and more disrupted by things they take as good and bad.
The attraction of the Beanworld for fans is hard to describe. It is like a kind of bizarre ethnography: you learn about these beans' world by watching them be surprised by disruptions to and things from outside their world.
The cover of the first issue I read, number 7:
I had literally no idea what was depicted here when I first saw it (the hands of the local scientist using an adhesive to join two locally-occurring shapes to make a spear, while bean-faces observe). I must have read the issue dozens of times in that first week. I think I remember the first night or two of reading it under the living room lamp on the dark green rug.
C.S. Lewis says of Phantastes (which I quote from here) that reading it was a "baptism of his imagination." I can't say exactly the same, but encountering Beanworld was somehow similar for me.
This page is from issue 4, Beanish Breaks Out! The story details the "breakout" of the artist-bean, the process by which he felt drawn to do something their tribe had never conceived of (visual art), quit his regular "job" to do it, and then was accepted in this new role by the tribe. These panels show the other beans' first experience of Beanish's visual art: at first they think it is a real instance of what it depicts.
mao The Perilous Dreamer
The attraction of the Beanworld for fans is hard to describe. It is like a kind of bizarre ethnography: you learn about these beans' world by watching them be surprised by disruptions to and things from outside their world.
The cover of the first issue I read, number 7:
I had literally no idea what was depicted here when I first saw it (the hands of the local scientist using an adhesive to join two locally-occurring shapes to make a spear, while bean-faces observe). I must have read the issue dozens of times in that first week. I think I remember the first night or two of reading it under the living room lamp on the dark green rug.
C.S. Lewis says of Phantastes (which I quote from here) that reading it was a "baptism of his imagination." I can't say exactly the same, but encountering Beanworld was somehow similar for me.
This page is from issue 4, Beanish Breaks Out! The story details the "breakout" of the artist-bean, the process by which he felt drawn to do something their tribe had never conceived of (visual art), quit his regular "job" to do it, and then was accepted in this new role by the tribe. These panels show the other beans' first experience of Beanish's visual art: at first they think it is a real instance of what it depicts.
mao The Perilous Dreamer
