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Post by cwm on Feb 10, 2009 11:02:32 GMT -5
The UK TBB cover (this might be clearer on your own cover): upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/The_Bad_Beginning_UK.PNGCheck out Olaf's one visible eye. TBB wasn't published in the UK until 2001; had Helquist already been told about the eye design at this point? Because that looks too perfect to me - the sagging bags under his eyes forming the D, and the line above linking in to form the F - to be coincidental.
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Post by Dante on Feb 10, 2009 12:58:44 GMT -5
Hmm. I assume that the insignia was finalised for the U.A., which came out in 2002; THH came out in September 2001, it seems. The U.K. TBB art originated on The Trouble Begins box set, which came out, apparently, October 2001... TVV came out April 2001... Allow several months for Helquist to plan and draw the illustration... (Forgive me if these dates are wrong; I'm in a great hurry and don't have time to double-check.)
It's borderline, but I'm going to go with coincidence.
Edit: Conceivably, however, Handler could have finalised the insignia design and told Helquist about it at any time after TVV had been completed and was ready for publication, along with its corresponding chapter illustrations. I don't remember anything that's meant to be the V.F.D. eye appearing in THH, so it could already have been designed at the time. Depends how long Handler had been accumulating material for the U.A. for.
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Post by Mijahu on Feb 10, 2009 21:36:48 GMT -5
He could have drawn up the eye as he wrote TAA, I should think, which came out late 2000. Or maybe he actually got the the idea from Olaf's eye in this illustration?
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Post by cwm on Feb 11, 2009 2:55:12 GMT -5
He could have drawn up the eye as he wrote TAA, I should think, which came out late 2000. Or maybe he actually got the the idea from Olaf's eye in this illustration? Helquist was still drawing the eye as a 'normal' eye in The Vile Village, though. And Esme's purse is meant to look like the V.F.D. eye in THH, but yet still looks like a normal eye, I believe.
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Post by Dante on Feb 11, 2009 3:28:10 GMT -5
And Esme's purse is meant to look like the V.F.D. eye in THH, but yet still looks like a normal eye, I believe. The claim that that's meant to match the eyes on Olaf's ankle and so on I take to be something of an exaggeration, a statement that it matches the image of the eye, not the specific detail of the V.F.D. insignia. Because how would you have a bag shaped like the V.F.D. insignia? So I don't count that one. I'm prepared to believe Helquist knew what the insignia had been finalised as by then. He's no stranger to artistic license - consider his illustrations of the insignia on Olaf's ankle in TSS and the cover of The End.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 11, 2009 13:18:58 GMT -5
Because how would you have a bag shaped like the V.F.D. insignia? Yes, that has puzzled me as well. (Likewise the claim that Dr Orwell's office was shaped like the eye on Olaf's ankle.)
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Post by cwm on Feb 11, 2009 15:03:07 GMT -5
The Orwell eye was of course before the concept that the eye tattoo spelt out V.F.D. By TSS, Handler is still saying that the eye tattoo and the office looked the same; Helquist's illustrations we can probably explain away as 'unreliable illustrator'.
Possibly the V, F and D are just meshed together very closely? Or it's simply the Baudelaires' paranoia, since the story is being told from their perspective even if it has a different narrator.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 11, 2009 15:36:50 GMT -5
The Orwell eye was of course before the concept that the eye tattoo spelt out V.F.D. Well, so was Esme's handbag - Handler may have had it in mind by then, but it doesn't become explicit until TUA, which was published after THH. It seems more likely to me (as I think Dante suggested a while ago) that his early illustrations are unreliable, because he hadn't seen the VFD eye at that point; the later ones, in that case, ought to get it right. This, of course, still leaves us with the puzzle of how to account for the office and the handbag. Perhaps their outline was just an ellipse, but they had the VFD eye pictured on them?
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Post by cwm on Feb 11, 2009 15:43:04 GMT -5
He has the idea, certainly, for the significance eye by TVV; it seems logical he would have come up with the hidden letters in the eye at the same point.
And in-universe, it's possible that Brett Helquist is simply taking artistic license for his illustrations. Or that Lemony has failed to report on the actual imagery of the eye at the time, so in TBB, TWW, TMM or anything else pre-TUA, so Helquist is making assumptions.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 11, 2009 17:40:36 GMT -5
So are you suggesting that we have never seen the real VFD eye - that both the early and late designs are just Helquist's guesses? I suppose that's quite possible, though it's rather sad if it's true.
(I think, though, that Handler might have decided that the eye is a symbol of VFD first, and only later on come up with the idea that it actually spelled VFD; he could at first have thought it was their symbol because they were always on the lookout for villainy, or something like that.)
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Post by Mijahu on Feb 11, 2009 20:04:45 GMT -5
(I think, though, that Handler might have decided that the eye is a symbol of VFD first, and only later on come up with the idea that it actually spelled VFD; he could at first have thought it was their symbol because they were always on the lookout for villainy, or something like that.) This was probably the case, but I'm sure it wasn't too long at all after that when the eye was changed to mimic the letters.
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Post by Dante on Feb 12, 2009 3:27:26 GMT -5
Certainly it seems fair to say that by TVV, Handler's decided that the eye is something associated with V.F.D. and not just Olaf, as Jacques prominently displays the eye tattoo and says that he has it as part of his job. I fancy at the time, though, that he was just retconning the eye into a symbol representing V.F.D., and hadn't yet come up with the combination of letters. That continues to strike me as something unique to the U.A.
And once the insignia is finalised, Helquist gets it right everywhere except characters' ankles. Documents and tents in TCC, the tent in TSS, hotel decorations in TPP... it's just Olaf's ankle that he continues to be inconsistent on. So I'm calling that artistic license, as he clearly knows what the correct version looks like.
Edit: Another point: When Handler writes comparing a random eye somewhere to the eye on Olaf's ankle and to Esmé's handbag and Dr. Orwell's office, I think he's only saying they are the same in the sense that they are eyes - not that they all literally resemble the letter-combining V.F.D. insignia. I would apply this even to some examples after the insignia was finalised, like Olaf's eye-decorated suit in TSS; there's no reason it couldn't be decorated with hundreds of V.F.D. insignias, but it feels like one of the previous cases.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 13, 2009 12:57:24 GMT -5
Perhaps the VFD emblem wasn't copied perfectly on members' ankles anyway. On another thread, people have been commenting about the difficulty of getting it right.
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Post by Dante on Feb 13, 2009 13:28:14 GMT -5
I don't know. I'm uncomfortable about accepting the inconsistency of illustrations as being in some measure canon. But I suppose that's getting into the matter of what we would define as canonical material, particularly in a series where continuity is in flux. It's forgiveable that we can't decide what and where the tattoo is meant to be, but the characters should be rather more expert at it. I'd have thought they'd have the tattooing down to a fine art - but then again, while we know when they stopped marking members' ankles, we don't know when they started. I've tended to see something of the idea of the (similarly inconsistent) "witches' mark" in them, suggesting a centuries-old art - or at least, one as old as tattooing. (And of course, the series has a fictional history as well. I seem to be having a hard time getting anywhere here.)
Anyway. Getting back to your original point, hermes: I'm suddenly struck with the idea that, for fan-fictional purposes, different branches of V.F.D., whether occupational or geographical, might be distinguished by the slightly individualised fashion in which they mark the insignia on volunteers and on documents and such. But since V.F.D. has a headquarters, albeit a moving one, it seems they have a centralised education program. I imagine the insignia is decorated consistently at least around their own headquarters, and would be quite drilled into neophytes' heads by the close of their training. It's also worth noting that, while the rather more "official" version of the insignia that appears in the U.A. is at odds with the more eye-like variation Helquist tends to draw, the distinction is in the illustrations only and not in the text. The scribbled version early on in the U.A. strikes me as the most likely to have been designed by Handler himself. So I suppose it may well boil down to canonicity, ultimately - or to personal preference.
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Post by cwm on Feb 13, 2009 13:54:50 GMT -5
Oh yes, and in TGG the Queequeg's periscope is meant to resemble a V.F.D. eye. Just to confuse things even further.
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