Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl. The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting. Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection. That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go. I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed. His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts. This short story, however, worked like a charm. The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe). My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raise...
Drawing Virgil's Fields of Asphodel put me more than a little in mind of Ursula K. Le Guin. Along those lines, I began thinking of a similar scene in the Earthsea Cycle that I could draw using the same techniques. Here we have Ged in the Otherworld trapped between the Land of the Dead and the Shadow. I'm most happy with the Shadow and Ged's cape. These are the pastel pencils again (Conte) on black paper. There's a little computer editing on the midtones to bring the scan closer to the original.
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