Like Paper Blossoms, Pat the Zombie uses a children’s book format in a book for an adult audience. Pat the Zombie is a parody of children’s tactile books; a ‘cruel adult spoof’, as it styles itself. The book’s design aesthetic successfully mimics the spoofed genre, but poor production means Pat the Zombie the book looks even tackier than its premise promises. Sadly, Pat the Zombie fails where Paper Blossoms succeeded. Both tactile and pop-up books require design and construction to work together, but Pat the Zombie’s design fails to take into account the limitations of its construction, and its construction is flimsy and poorly designed.
The soft pastel blue and orange of the cover are strongly reminiscent of vintage young children’s books, more Ahlberg than Stephanie Blake. The image of the zombified bunny is incongruous by design.
Where the cover really falls down is in its text. The all-lowercase title and all-uppercase subtitle and author names are a bad combination. I imagine the intention was that the lowercase would make the text look more cutesy and inoffensive, in juxtaposition with what the text is actually saying, but I think this could have been better achieved by using a more characteristic, deliberately cutesy or twee typeface than the generic sans-serif used here.
The colour scheme of the cover continues throughout the book: soft pastel blues, oranges, and greens, with bright red splatters of blood where necessary. The juxtaposition of pastels and blood-spatters is effective for the book’s intent.
The tactile elements of the book are inserted behind and through the printed interior pages. Some of these are successful; some are less so.
The tactile elements of ‘Daddy’s putrefying face’ are bubbled plastic. The rubbery texture is suitable for the gruesome loose eyeball and exploratory worms, and the plastic is thin enough that it doesn’t affect the fall of the page.
The same cannot be said for the zombie-bunny’s stomach. The ‘fur’ portion is so thick and large that it heavily distorts the page around it, and no attempt has been made to disguise the bulginess of the page around the bunny’s stomach. This page also affects how the book lies closed or turned to another page, as the fur prevents the page from falling flat.
The book’s strange binding is meant to counteract the uneven bulges in pages caused by the tactile surfaces used throughout the book. The half-ring-binding supports pages made uneven by, for example, the large section of fluffy fabric that forms the bunny’s stomach on this page. However, the overall effect is flimsy, and pages still bend and warp as they fall open. The book is sold in a box, which I suspect plays double duty as presenting the book as a gift-book and protecting the book from shelf damage such as the rings snapping under pressure.
The ring-binding also undermines the design’s mimicry of children’s books of this sort. Tactile children’s books are specifically designed for extra durability in the face of enthusiastic patting; as Pat the Bunny is aimed at an adult audience the extra durability is not required, but a different binding could have better supported the visual parody.
Samples collected: 10 May 2012
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| Pat the Zombie in its presentation box. |
The soft pastel blue and orange of the cover are strongly reminiscent of vintage young children’s books, more Ahlberg than Stephanie Blake. The image of the zombified bunny is incongruous by design.
Where the cover really falls down is in its text. The all-lowercase title and all-uppercase subtitle and author names are a bad combination. I imagine the intention was that the lowercase would make the text look more cutesy and inoffensive, in juxtaposition with what the text is actually saying, but I think this could have been better achieved by using a more characteristic, deliberately cutesy or twee typeface than the generic sans-serif used here.
The colour scheme of the cover continues throughout the book: soft pastel blues, oranges, and greens, with bright red splatters of blood where necessary. The juxtaposition of pastels and blood-spatters is effective for the book’s intent.
The tactile elements of the book are inserted behind and through the printed interior pages. Some of these are successful; some are less so.
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| Daddy's putrefying face spread. Note the plastic inserts of the eye and worms. Also note how unevenly the pages behind this spread are lying |
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| Gut the zombie spread. Note the poor design of the bulky fur inserted behind the page |
The book’s strange binding is meant to counteract the uneven bulges in pages caused by the tactile surfaces used throughout the book. The half-ring-binding supports pages made uneven by, for example, the large section of fluffy fabric that forms the bunny’s stomach on this page. However, the overall effect is flimsy, and pages still bend and warp as they fall open. The book is sold in a box, which I suspect plays double duty as presenting the book as a gift-book and protecting the book from shelf damage such as the rings snapping under pressure.
The ring-binding also undermines the design’s mimicry of children’s books of this sort. Tactile children’s books are specifically designed for extra durability in the face of enthusiastic patting; as Pat the Bunny is aimed at an adult audience the extra durability is not required, but a different binding could have better supported the visual parody.
Samples collected: 10 May 2012
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