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Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard (J. J. Grandville): Un Autre Monde and other illustrations 1844.
Just three years before he died, the prolific artist-illustrator who used the pseudonym Grandville produced a graphic work imagining other worlds and other visions that we now would label ‘science fiction’. Carl Guderian has uploaded much of Un Autre Monde and describes it thus: “Grandville (1803-1847), whose real name was Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, was a caricaturist later recognized as a grandfather of Surrealism. Un Autre Monde (1844) describes a parallel world created by three sleazy demiurges named Dr. Krackq, Dr. Puff and Dr. Hahblle. Each also travels within the world, describing its people and their customs. Obviously, the “other” world is a thinly-veiled parody of our own. Unfortunately, time has thickened the veil, and a lot of the political and cultural allusions have been lost, or at least have become a lot harder to work out.” These images were discovered by the Surrealists in the 1920s, and were the inspirations for works of fantasy, like Bryan Talbot’s recent Grandville steam-punk graphic novels (2009) imagining (post William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine) an alt-history of the 19th century. I love them.
While Hayao Miyazake, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling practically invented the art of ‘steam punk’ alternate worlds in the late 1980s, early 1990s ( Hayao Miyazake Castle in the Sky:1989, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; The Difference Engine 1990), 150 years earlier the talented artist-satirical cartoonist and imaginative illustrator J.J. Grandville had beaten them all to it with his remarkable work Un Autre Monde (1844), created just on the cusp of the Photographic Age. Grandville’s work was widely inspirational even in his own time - his anthropomorphic animal fables predated those now more famous illustrations by Beatrix Potter (The Tale of Peter Rabbit 1902), and the wonderful Alice in Wonderland illustrations by John Tenniel (1865) - who was a great admirer of Grandville’s work. And like many writers who imagine alternative worlds and futures, Grandville was fiercely critical of his own times, and Un Autre Monde is characterised by satirical comment on the leading French politicians and socio-cultural heirarchy in the turbulent 1840s.