The website Woot is holding a design competition for best “classic literature mashup” to print on a T-shirt. Moby-Dick is well-represented among the entrants. In one design, The Owl and the Pussycat float inside the contented whale’s belly; in another, Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence bears Moby Dick’s silhouette. There’s also a whale-besotted Little Mermaid and a bridled Moby Dick with Odysseus (?) on his back.
For my money though, the best Moby-Dick mashup isn’t a T-shirt but a comic book—Huckleberry Dick, a collage of two Classics Illustrated comics by Paris photographer Ricardo Bloch. Interweaving the first-person tales of watery voyages, Bloch discovers new humor and absurdity. (He also brings Moby-Dick’s thinly veiled homoeroticism to the fore.) The collage, created with scissors and glue in 1995, was recently published in a limited facsimile edition of 250, available for about $30 via PayPal.
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
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