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Posted 20 hours ago

Fungus the Bogeyman

£3.995£7.99Clearance
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I love Briggs's dense, complex page design and his masterful use of an array of layout and design features. Briggs uses hilarious wordplay and cultural inversions to create encyclopaedic entries about the strange place of Bogeydom, its inhabitants and customs. Yes, ultimately the joke is one-note (everything in bogeydom is more or less the reverse of things in the human world, so bogeymen prefer dirt to cleanliness, cold to warmth, wet to dry, and so on, though there are occasional inconsistencies), but Briggs pulls off so many brilliant variations on it, and paces them out so carefully as he narrates Fungus's typical "day" (read night) of frightening and irritating people, all the while wondering what purpose his job serves, that the joke somehow never gets tired.

Through the richly-detailed pages, contrasts and parallels are revealed between the gentle, disgusting Bogeys, and humans. It reads almost like a comic book with incredibly detailed illustrations in individual boxes with speech bubbles or text. And even considering that many children do seem to massively relish and cherish humour based on bodily functions and liquid excretions, I do have to wonder whether the massive amounts of the latter occurring in Fungus the Bogeyman might well end up being potentially distracting and even too much of a "good thing" (so much so as to even jade and feel dragging for children who usually enjoy this type of humour, these types of jokes).Hamish Hamilton London 1982 First Edition VG (illus hardcover sl rubbed and worn, sl faded, internally book is clean and bright and all pop ups appear to work! That is what I loved this time around, Fungus did not know why he scares people, why he puts boils on them and why he does this day after day. Almost documentary-style, the book follows a day in the life of the title character, his work and home life, and along the way introduces the culture and manners of his people, the Bogeys, whose occupation is frightening humans, also known as the surface-dwelling “Dry Cleaners”.

One of my earliest book-related memories is of my parents taking me to the local library so I could rumage through the cluttered jumble of children's books, always in the hope of finding this buried treasure. Life in Bogeydom is full of snot, smells, slime, scum and other unspeakable things, and Bogeymen live under the ground revelling in all the nastiness imaginable. It was produced by Andy Serkis's motion-capture studio, The Imaginarium, with Serkis also as the narrator. An immensely inventive picture book landmark enjoyed as much by adults as children, Briggs' incredibly detailed classic charts a day in the gleefully gross and disgusting life of the eponymous monster. Briggs says that he invented Fungus, ‘to show the petty nastiness of life — slime and spit and dandruff, all this awful stuff which is slightly funny because it detracts from human dignity and our pretensions.Fungus is a great creation / interpretation of a traditional monster, previously enshrined in folklore and now reinvented by Briggs brilliantly for the modern age. Yes, the characters and their world is beautifully drawn, with lots and lots of fascinating written detail for those whose imagination is sufficiently grabbed to enjoy the sheer grottiness of it all; or should that be ‘snottiness’?

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