Whales and Wiener Dogs

It Was Now Clear Sunrise by Matt Kish

The above drawing is for page 97. Check out all the “One Drawing For Every Page of Moby Dick” art here.

Just imagine a Moby Dick that looked like this!

Shane Acker and Timur Bekmambetov, director and producer respectively of the movie 9, told comingsoon.net (not a porn site) they dream of making a bizarre version of Moby Dick.

CS: You’ve been attached to a lot of other movies, so have you been working to develop some of them?
Bekmambetov: Yes, yeah, we’ve been developing “Moby Dick,” for example, which is my true love. We’re making it all about Moby Dick as Frankenstein, it’s a supernatural creature. The concept is that if you have a supernatural creature than you need whalers with supernatural abilities.

CS: So this is more of a fantasy version of “Moby Dick” rather than another adaptation of the book.
Bekmambetov: Yes.

Meh…I don’t know. 9, which opens this weekend on 9/9/09, looked to me in the previews like another mildly cool cutesy-goth Tim Burton thing that would sit at the ass-end of my Netflix queue for the rest of my natural life, but it’s got a preliminary 87% positive rating on rottentomatoes.com.

I just don’t understand why Werner Herzog won’t just go ahead and make a great Moby Dick movie. Hell, I’d settle for a documentary that Herzog made about himself as he tries to raise Klaus Kinski from the dead to play Ahab.

Whale by Tristan Lowe

Available for your view pleasure through “the summer” at the Philadelphia Fabric Workshop And Museum. 52 feet of felt covered inflatable whale.

The whale is called Mocha Dick after the supposedly-real whale that inspired Moby Dick.

And the version he has, has 552 pages in it. I’m no arithmetician, but that’s 552 original drawings. He’s up to about page 25. We’ll see…but so far, so good.

Page 1: Call Me Ishmael

From the first blog post, Matt says: “Because I honestly consider Moby-Dick to be the greatest novel ever written, I am now going to create one illustration for every single one of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition. I’l try to do one a day, but we’ll see.”

Good luck. I can’t think of a more worthwhile endeavor.

Moby Dick Cover By Emmanuel Polanco

Emmanuel Polanco is an artist living in France. He’s got a lot of nice work on his site, including this cover/poster of Moby Dick.

Check out his site. Good stuff.