London-based illustrator and cartoonist Tom Gauld makes books that double as art objects—books that come in weird shapes with unusual covers and paper stock that you just want to rub your cheek against (go ahead, Gauld would be cool with that.)
His newest, The Gigantic Robot is a minimalist fable about human folly and the passage of time rendered in fifteen flawless images and just as many sentences. The book has the appearance of a children’s book but the resonance of something far darker and probably inaccessible to the most innocent minds. As Glen David Gold puts it, Gould’s “black humor makes Beckett look timid.”
Without spoiling the story, we’ll just say that the moral of The Gigantic Robot is chilling (in a good way) while the perfection of the artwork is something to admire with untrammeled wonder. The particular cocktail of light and dark that Gauld cooks up is something to behold, especially at the start of a brand new—and heretofore unmapped—decade.
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