Some years back, when I was looking for public-domain works to beef up my book illustration portfolio, I came across Andrew Lang’s famous Fairy Books series. Each volume in this impressive turn-of-the-last-century set are referred to by the color of the cover — the “Blue Fairy Book”, the “Yellow Fairy Book”, etc. I thought it’d be fun to reprint the original text of these with new frontispiece illustrations, covers, spot illos… All the bells and whistles. I thought it would be a fun illustration challenge, and I’d love to have a great collection of books like this to design and publish. I downloaded the text for the complete series over at Gutenberg.org and dug in. Unfortunately I got hung up on the dry, archaic prose — and nevermind that the Folio Society already beat me to that particular punch:

So anyway, flash to last night while I’m trying to sleep and a thought occurred to me – why not instead do full-on adaptations of the stories, with my own dialog and characters? It could be a fun way to celebrate my favorite mini-comic format, with simple short adaptations & updates of these stories, with different settings and time periods even. I could even combine stories from different books and re-cast the stories into my own non-color based themes – “Robot Fairy Book”, “Dinosaur Fairy Book”, “Skeleton Fairy Book”.

Anyway, it’s a thought.