I wanted to include this one because I like the Helquist drawing quite a bit. The Helquist dead-y is a good piece of art, for sure, but it feels like something we've seen before. The more you look at it, the weirder it is. Crotch up at its neck, one arm branching into two hands, another arm that is connected up all wrong. When Gammell gives us something ghostly, he gives us something that's totally new and unfamiliar. With the new images, Scary Stories is not the taboo book it once was. While Helquist's image has the blood, it's just not in-your-face enough that it would raise a lot of parental eyebrows. These books, to a kid, felt like forbidden objects, things you weren't supposed to have. This replacement is indicative of one of the issues with the new art. While Helquist has the cloth-covered bowl with a splash of blood, Gammell has the actual head with steam coming out the top, not to mention it's being carried by a grandmotherly type. Helquist went for the more creeping horror. If I have a choice of going up against one type of gator in my nightmares tonight, and if I can choose between a Gammell gator and a Helquist gator, I know which way I'm leaning. Gammell's gator? That looks like a disgusting killing machine. That said, Helquist's gators look a little sleepy, and their eyes are kind of cartoon-y.
Both give the gators a sort of facial expression, and as much as I love gators, I don't see them as having terribly expressive faces. Neither of these gator drawings are overly accurate. Why is this a bad replacement? Because we took the dripping, vein-y debris attached to the hook's cup in Gammell's drawing and replaced it with torn fabric. Helquist's stuff is more direct and tidy. They feel more "other" and have this weird contrast of cleanliness and filth where the Helquist stuff is more muted, more leveled-out. The high contrast and the stark white pages are striking. One big difference, right away, is the high contrast black and white from the Gammell books and the more sepia paper in the Helquist books. With this image, being a similar subject, we can see those differences at work. There are some general differences in what Gammell did and what Helquist did. Let's gnash our teeth together and go through some of the worst replacements. Has there ever been a collection of illustrations that caused more nightmares than those by Stephen Gammell? Have you ever seen anything like them? Did you, like me, buy a Halloween sweater with an all-over Gammell print? His grin, the juice dripping down his chin, it's all spot on.īut let's face facts. The meat on the plate and skewered on his fork look vile. Helquist's toad-y creep is just about perfect. Take this comparison from "Just Delicious" (Gammell on the left, Helquist on the right, which will be the convention throughout this column): Before we go burning down.whatever it is people in mobs burn down with torches and pitchforks (and before we go pitchforkin' for that matter), let's be clear about something: Brett Helquist, Stephen Gammell's replacement, is a really good artist. Usually I wait until the end of a column to make a judgment, but screw that, this was a terrible idea. People were incensed, but now that some time's passed, we should be able to evaluate it objectively. It's been a few years since the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark trilogy got a major facelift, replacing Stephen Gammell's art/living nightmares with Brett Helquist's tamer take on the urban legends, folktales, and general creepiness collected by Alvin Schwartz.