Walter Moers has cleverly built a fantastical tale around 21 drawings from the work of the famous 19th-century illustrator, Gustave Doré. The woodcuts reproduced in the book are of gryphons and monsters, naked damsels and dragons and the faces of the moon; Moers has plenty to go on. He spellbinds and spooks it all up into a well-knitted super-scary flight of fancy that should appeal to sophisticated and naive children alike.
Moers’ young hero is Doré himself as a 12-year-old child. We meet him when he is rather incredibly captaining a ship which is at threat from perilous twin storms, the spiralling Siamese Twins Tornado. He survives and finds himself clinging to the wreckage of his sinking ship, alone but for Death, a skeletal black-cloaked figure who quotes Goethe, and Death’s poor half-crazed sister Dementia. They play dice for Gustave’s soul, but he does a deal with Death, accepting the challenge of achieving six impossible tasks in return for his young life.
His first task is to rescue a naked damsel from the jaws of a dragon and he flies off, post-haste on a gryphon’s back to the island of damsels in distress. Only one of these golden-haired Godivas is in difficulties; the others, far from being distressed, hunt the dragons and refine their blubber into suntan cream (practical, they are all naked) or tame them for their milk, a skin-rejuvenating product. Our hero succeeds, receives little thanks for his labours and leaves the island lovelorn and broken-hearted.
For his second task — traversing a forest swarming with evil spirits — he acquires a talking nag called Pancho Sanso. Pancho quickly comes to a sticky end, though. Singing a horsy doggerel about eating ghost-grass, ‘just a friendly weed that blows your mind’, the earth sucks him under and Gustave is left to charm the evil spirits alone.
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