Review
Monster Blood Tattoo sucked our then twelve-year-old son in on
the first page and spat him back out a couple of days later once he'd read
the book cover to cover (including the glossary and the 100 page appendix, which
particularly fascinated him) and pored over the maps and illustrations. In the intervening period we did see him from time to time - for meals and
breathless plot updates - but in essence, although his body was with us, his
mind was somewhere in the Half-Continent! With illustrations reminiscent
of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, this is a book to kindle the imagination
of any child who revels in fantastic worlds filled with fantastic creatures.
Dyan Blacklock, publisher with Omnibus Books (an imprint of Scholastic in
Australia), recalls how she became aware of the Half-Continent world: D.M.
Cornish, a young illustrator earning...
Beyond the Book
D.M. Cornish was born in time to see the first Star Wars movie. He was five. It
made him realize that worlds beyond his own were possible, and he failed to eat
his popcorn. Experiences with C.S. Lewis, and later J.R.R. Tolkien, completely
convinced him that other worlds existed, and that writers had a key to these
worlds. But words were not his earliest tools for storytelling. Drawings
were.
He spent most of his childhood drawing, as well as most of his teenage and adult
years as well. And by age eleven he had made his first book, called "Attack from
Mars." It featured Jupitans and lots and lots of drawings of space battles. (It
has never been published and world rights are still available!)
He studied illustration at the University of South...
