Darger's resources

Moon turns his attention to the artist Henry Darger, an eccentric and self-taught artist whose work was only discovered after his death. Since then the work has become famous, but Darger himself has generally been seen as a withdrawn outsider artist whose work may have been the result of mental illness. Moon provides a contrasting view of a creative and gifted artist very responsive to the world around him. Abstract: Focuses on the artist Henry Darger, an eccentric and self-taught artist whose work was only discovered after his death. This title shows how Darger drew on novels, comics, pulps, and the history of his time to produce a sometimes disturbing and sometimes joyful but always imaginative alternative world. Read more...

Henry Darger (1892–1973) was a hospital janitor and an immensely productive artist and writer. In the first decades of adulthood, he wrote a 15,145-page fictional epic, In the Realms of the Unreal. He spent much of the rest of his long life illustrating it in astonishing drawings and watercolors. In Darger's unfolding saga, pastoral utopias are repeatedly savaged by extreme violence directed at children, particularly girls. Given his disturbing subject matter and the extreme solitude he maintained throughout his life, critics have characterized Darger as eccentric, deranged, and even dangerous, as an outsider artist compelled to create a fantasy universe. Contesting such pathologizing interpretations, Michael Moon looks to Darger's resources, to the narratives and materials that inspired him and often found their way into his writing, drawings, and paintings. Moon finds an artist who reveled in the burgeoning popular culture of the early twentieth century, in its newspaper comic strips, pulp fiction, illustrated children's books, and mass-produced religious art. Moon contends that Darger's work deserves and rewards comparison with that of contemporaries of his, such as the "pulp historians" H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum, and the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher.

Contents 8 Preface 10 Introduction 18 Chapter 1: Darger’s Book of Martyrs 42 Chapter 2: Rotten Truths, Wasted Lives, Spoiled Collections: Darger’s Work and the Brontës’ Juvenilia 60 Chapter 3: Abduction, Adoption, Appropriation: Darger and the Early Newspaper Comic Strip; or, Reading Around in the Ruins of a Proletarian Public Sphere 96 Chapter 4: Weird Flesh, World’s Flesh: Darger and the Pulps 118 Notes 148 Bibliography 158 Acknowledgments 162 Index 166 Summary:Moon turns his attention to the artist Henry Darger, an eccentric and self-taught artist whose work was only discovered after his death. Since then the work has become famous, but Darger himself has generally been seen as a withdrawn outsider artist whose work may have been the result of mental illness. Moon provides a contrasting view of a creative and gifted artist very responsive to the world around him Content: Darger's book of martyrs -- Rotten truths, wasted lives, spoiled collections: Darger's work and the Brontes' juvenilia -- Abduction, adoption, appropriation : Darger and the early newspaper comic strip or, reading around in the ruins of a proletarian public sphere -- Weird flesh, world's flesh: Darger and the pulps.