Umberto Eco & Eugenio Carmi I

I have just discovered works by Umberto Eco and Eugenio Carmi that are incredible thought provoking challenging works of children's literature and illustration. This one, 'The Bomb and the General', is about the atom bomb and a general obsessed by stockpiling them. Though the atoms do not want to be a destructive force and they rebel and run away.

The artwork by Eugenio Carmi is abstract and graphic is as challenging and perplexing as the story. Eugenio builds the imagery from collaged, printed and watercolour elements they are very graphic indeed they remind me of scraps of news that would have caught your eye, as a child, in your parents newspapers. In this way the book reproduces those awkward moments when children glimpse elements of our world that look (in an abstract way) interesting, before knowing the horror and madness, that we all witness, in the abstraction that is news. A world that we even as adults feel is beyond our control or comprehension as we are the hostages of power and ego.