Jim Flora’s Ghost Stories
In the 1940s and 1950s, Ohio-born artist James “Jim” Flora’s whimsically disturbing pre-psychedelic cover art for countless jazz and classical albums was unmistakable. With a few heavy shades of Breughel and Hieronymous Bosch in a Pop Art context, his covers for RCA and Columbia releases featured, among other things, wild caricatures of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman with multiple arms, a few too many eyes, in general at least three legs and skin patterned like fabric. In later years his artwork, which has been described as “mischievous,” “diabolical” and “sinister” would go on to grace the pages of numerous publications ranging from LIFE and Collier’s to a several-year stint painting covers for Computer Design magazine.
Unlikely as it seems considering his mind-twisting style, between 1955 and 1982, while working closely with famed children’s book editor Margaret McElderry, Flora would also write and illustrate seventeen children’s books, including The Fabulous Firework Family, The Day the Cow Sneezed, Pishtosh, Bullwash & Wimple, and Charlie Yup and his Snip-Snap Boys.
Over the years most of Flora’s children’s books would be rediscovered on a regular basis, save for one.
Originally published by Atheneum Books in 1978, Grandpa’s Ghost Stories was never republished, not by Atheneum and not by anyone else. In fact it was occasionally even left off bibliographies of Flora’s work. You have to wonder if, that first time around, it left too many impressionable kids with too many emotional scars.
Noting the lack (and quite possibly the demand), Adam Parfrey, founding editor of the venerable indie publisher Feral House, decided to reissue Grandpa’s Ghost Stories for the first time in nearly forty years in a gorgeous new hardcover edition. It would not be the first disturbing children’s book Feral House released, having put out an edition of Struwwelpeter in the Nineties.
When Parfrey contacted the Flora estate about obtaining the rights, he was surprised to encounter his friend, archivist, preservationist and long-time WFMU radio host Irwin Chusid, who was handling business affairs for Flora’s family and estate.
“In the late 1990s, I had no idea Jim Flora existed, even though I owned a few samples of his album cover art,” Chusid admits. “Flora illustrated some of the most outrageously cartoonish record sleeves of the 1940s and ‘50s, and a few had wandered into my LP collection. But it wasn’t until fall 1997, during a visit to the upstate cottage of my buddy, illustrator J.D. King, that I noticed several strikingly-drawn, vintage album jackets framed under glass. I recognized the style immediately, since those in my collection were obviously designed by the same artist: James Flora, who it turned out, was one of J.D.’s biggest influences. J.D. facilitated an intro to Flora, who was retired and living on a residential island off Norwalk, Connecticut. Jim and I talked on the phone a few times, and I offered to set up a primitive website for his album art. I visited him once, in May 1998, shortly after he was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer.”
Along with representing the estate following Flora’s death later in 1998, Chusid also went on to edit four anthologies of Flora’s artwork, which were published by Fantagraphics.
“Obviously I can’t say much about Jim’s personality from a single encounter,” Chusid says. “But based on what I’ve read and been told by his numerous friends and business colleagues, EVERYONE loved Jim Flora. Though an artist works in solitude — and by all accounts, Jim had a dogged work ethic — he was clearly a people person who loved socializing, traveling, extending generosities, and sharing a cocktail. Kids who grew up in the neighborhood said Flora used to regale them with stories and draw pictures while he was storytelling.”
Grandpa’s Ghost Stories opens on the traditional dark and stormy night. In a cross section of an old house, we see an elderly man in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe with his grandson on his knee. At the young boy’s urgings, Grandpa (who would be featured in two other Flora books) tells the boy about a series of spooky adventures he had as a young boy himself on a stormy night just like this one. The illustrations are clean and simple, and offer no hint to the uninitiated and unwary of what lay ahead. Parents reading the book to their kids for the first time might well be expecting a few lighthearted, child-friendly chills, but things very quickly turn weird.
Over the course of the story, and a series of illustrations that are dark, rich and vibrant, the young Grandpa encounters a living, dancing, child-eating skeleton, a warty-nosed witch who turns him into a ”sticky spider with a squishy mouth,” same as she’d done to the dozens of other children who’d wandered into her cave, and a giant, foul-smelling ghost who forces him to watch Ghost TV (featuring cooking shows hosted by a demon and a witch, and a game show in which ghouls hack each other to pieces with axes), before her pet werewolf eats him. The illustrations remain deceptively simple but nightmare-inducing, the outdoor scenes in particular populated with hordes of tiny, scampering demons, multi-legged alligators, and leering, fanged plants. The story ends with first a happy twist, then one that’s a bit more unsettling.
Although a number of critics have noted that Flora’s deliriously bizarre work was toned down and softened considerably in the 1970s, the clean lines and gentle good humor throughout here doesn’t distract from the undeniable and gleeful grotesqueries on display (a young boy with spider legs sprouting from his sides, that same boy assembling a skeleton from a bag of jumbled dry bones, etc.). It can at times feel like what you might end up with had P.D. Eastman suffered a violent psychotic break after completing Go, Dog, Go!.
“The characters in his books — and in his commercial illustrations from 1960 on — generally got less edgy than they’d been in the 1940s and ‘50s,” Chusid says. “By the 1960s he was a successful commercial artist, and he was supporting a family (five children, with a largely stay-at-home mom, who was also a fine artist). Figures in his tableaus that used to be sharp, jagged, and stark became round and a bit cuddly. He dialed back the violence and vice, and downshifted from shocking to playful. But dark elements remained. He could still draw a terrifying monster from time to time. In Grandpa’s Ghost Stories, it seems like he emptied his sketchbooks of all unused monsters and populated them on every page.”
Flora once explained that the books arose out of the off-the cuff bedtime stories he improvised for his children. If they requested a story a second tine, he decided it might make a decent children’s book. Being a visual artist, not a writer, the idea of sitting down and typing out a story was alien to him. What he did instead was draw all the images in his head and lay them out like a movie storyboard, and let the text evolve from that.
“{Margaret} McElderry definitely helped him shape the stories,” Chusid explains. “She was one of the field’s foremost children’s book editors—the overused word “legendary” comes to mind, but it applies here. The Flora archive contains a crate of correspondence between Margaret and Jim that reveals a very affectionate and mutually respectful rapport. He would send ideas—skeletal scripts with sketches—and she would reply in detail why something worked or why it didn’t. For every book she accepted, two or three were rejected. But even the rejection letters are instructive. She would send three pages pointing out the flaws in the story, shortcomings in the characters, or simply why the book would lack commercial appeal. With each rejection, she urged Jim to keep at it, because she knew he would eventually produce another great book. In that respect, he never let her down.”
I asked Chusid why, of all of Flora’s books, Grandpa’s Ghost Stories would remain buried for nearly four decades.
“No idea,” he said. “It’s the most highly sought of Flora’s out of print books and the costliest from vintage booksellers. It seems to have had a huge impact on a generation of young readers, who grew up and wanted to share it with their children and grandchildren. Now they can, thanks to Feral House.”
In the 1980s, Flora left both children’s books and commercial art behind, turning to a fine art that at once struck out in a new direction and saw him returning to less-than-cuddly form. Filling canvasses with microscopic Breughelian detail, he was recognized in his final years for a series of maritime paintings in which ships carried passengers who (if you looked very, very closely) were engaged in every kind of vice and lewd act imaginable. Somehow, it made perfect sense.
by Jim Knipfel