Baum's Animals - Not Adorable (but Adorable!)

Last month, Jordan showed me L. Frank Baum's "Animal Fairy Tales."  Whoa.  They're dark.  They're like Kipling's Jungle Book.  Lots of violence, and menace...a lot of menace.  And themes about caste, and risking your life for what you believe in.  Amazing stuff, coming from the pen of the guy who wrote the Oz books.

 

So, how're we going to illustrate these?  Dunno!  I don't know whether John R. Neill's the right choice.  I mean, would you pick him to illustrate the Jungle Book?  What would that look like, I asked Midjourney.  I thought I'd ask it for an illustration of Baloo confronting Shere Khan, in the style of John R. Neill.  Would it do something Disney-like, or would it find Neill-like versions of the characters?

 

It gave me this:

 

 

Not exactly menacing.  Borderline adorable.  Look at that little ol' bare necessities smile Baloo is repressing in the third panel.

 

Clearly not going to work for the serious literature which Baum was trying for.  So I began looking at other styles of tigers.  Some suggestions from Midjourney:

 

 

 

But not going to work for Baum.  I started trying to get an oil painting out of Midjourney, and it gave me this (I didn't say anything about Disney, or even the character names, honest -- just a bear and a tiger and fire and an Indian jungle).

 

 

So I told it to do a charcoal drawing, and I swear it gave me this:

 

 

 

HIGH-larious.  Got me thinking about Winnie confronting the real Shere Khan.  Probably not a happy ending for a stuffed bear, especially when there's fire involved.