#oh and just to cover my bases

[oifaaa]

Wait so do u think timmy wasnt neglected as a child or do u think that neglegence isnt a big deal as long as their rich

Damn friend you really asked that in the most dishonest way you possibly could, like the only reason why I wouldn't think tims parents are neglectful is bc they're rich and not bc I just don't think they qualify as neglectful but let's go into it anyway

First off let's get our definition correct neglectful in parenting means the failure of a parent or guardian to provide basic needs for a child such as food clothing shelter medical care or supervision, which when people refer to tims parents being neglectful they're usually talking about that last one but even that's a stretch considering while tims parents were away working alot they never just left tim to fend for himself usually tim had someone else to watch him mostly in the form of boarding school so by the broad definition Jack and Janet drake were not neglectful parents - just bc theyre weren't always physically beside tim does not make them neglectful

Now do I think Jack and Janet were perfect parents - no but I do think people give them a lot of grief for reasons beyond their control such as them being away alot since theyre archaeologists and it's part of their jobs to travel alot personally i think it'd be worse if instead of leaving tim in a safe stable environment they were constantly upheaving him, moving him around and disrupting his schooling so what he could hang out at a dig site? Also we don't actually know for sure how often Jack and Janet were away for - we just know Tim wishes they were home more which btw is understandable I'm not saying Tim can't be upset at his parents not being around more, I'm just saying it's not exactly a good enough reason to jump to jack and janet were the worst parents ever like a lot of people seem to do.

The other thing people like to point to when talking about bad parenting is Jack and how he interacts with Tim after Janet died which honestly is just alot of the parent and child love each other but don't understand each other causing conflict troupe it's not exactly something I could really say puts Jack on the worst dad's list especially since he does try to be better and does get that character development as time goes on (you know before he dies too)

Anyway this is all long enough but I wanted to end on a cute note with these pages from this week's issue of batman #134

[son-of-the-sun23]

the herald awakens

hehe sketches and alt versions under the cut !!!

[wahwahmoment]

good morning wyllstarion nation

[chronicowboy]

i know obviously the still of buck and chris is probably-almost-definitely gonna have something to do with the basketball thing but on the tiniest off chance it doesn't: it's christopher trying to act cool and nonchalant as he asks buck what it's like to have a crush on someone and buck turns further and further away from chris as he describes it, hunches deeper and deeper as the words just keep spilling out and when he finally goes quiet chris asks "is that what you feel with natalia?" and buck whispers to himself "no" and then eddie walks in and goes "woah looks serious in here, everything okay?" and buck's like "uh, yeah, yeah, i've gotta go do something but uh see you guys soon" and then he goes and frees natalia from the homoerotic situationship haunting los angeles' women. [bonus: chris asks eddie the same question after a bit of deliberation about how insufferable his dad might be about the implications of chris asking said question and eddie gives an answer that is essentially the same as buck's and chris like. narrows his eyes and goes "that's exactly what buck said" and eddie like blanches a little bit and goes "huh, is it? anyway. who's got you feeling butterflies?"]

[deanofsam]

it just occurred to me that some of you might have missed seeing american football player joe burrow’s suit this past june during paris fashion week, and it is my personal opinion that everyone see these images at least once in their lifetime, especially those of us with a shared interest in slutty clothes on men (fictional or otherwise). so here they are.

[amaranthdahlia]

[chapter 408] extended cut - sewer chase scene

[caluette]

the truth

[fredbydawn]

I am once again putting in too much effort

[imminent-danger-came]

The sun as a corrupting horror, the heavens pouring out

[chalkodareal]

various john drawings. mostly just the good ones. drawings that suck too bad are not here. sorry about the weird way they probably look in the small version its a thing i do for insta sorry.

these are from like. multiple months so they still vary in quality a significant amount. scijohns are not here they probably get their own post at some point.

[angelnumber27]

*he spilled my cup of paint water all over everything idk why I said he spilled watercolors I just woke up girls

I literally walked away for two minutes tops to make coffee and came back to his ass sitting on this water color palette and my painting open after spilling my watercolor water all over it

Look at that face. He knows he did something wrong hahahha

[welcometoteyvat]

as a chinese person yall need to stop blaming the ccp for everything (read: hoyo is capable of making colorist design decisions and not everything is a result of censorship pls)

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[neonisradioactive]

“Are you sure you remember the way back to that town?”

“Yes. Probably. The path went like this…”

“Neigh.”

[grapejuicegay]

Okay, friend

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: WOODWORM by Layla Martinez.

Up next! Still in my Haunted House Era™: Translated Lit Fic Edition!

The great thing about being on several indie bookstore mailing lists is that you then have Several Indie Booksellers recommending you new releases published by independent presses, which almost assuredly I would not have stumbled across on my own. This one's just a little guy (149 pages), but I've been looking forward to it all year. Will report back on how it goes!