You’ve probably read — or seen — umpteen versions of the classic story Pinocchio. But you’ve never seen anything like Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition, an all-new, deluxe hardcover edition of Carlo Collodi’s classic novel with illustrations by Mike Mignola, and annotations by Lemony Snicket.
“It began with Mike Mignola, and his passion for Pinocchio,” Beehive Books co-founder and editor Josh O’Neill told Comic Book Club over email. “We have always dreamed of doing something with Mike. When we reached out to him in the early days of Beehive about doing an Illuminated Edition for us, Pinocchio was his instant reply.”
The book itself is stunning, with Mignola’s gorgeous spot illustrations, and hilariously grim fold-out notes from Snicket. With the edition now in stores, read on to find out more about how it came together.
Comic Book Club: Most general question possible, but what sparked the idea to create this illuminated edition?
Josh O’Neill: It began with Mike Mignola, and his passion for Pinocchio. We have always dreamed of doing something with Mike. When we reached out to him in the early days of Beehive about doing an Illuminated Edition for us, Pinocchio was his instant reply. But Mike is, of course, incredibly busy, so we were struggling for years to get it onto the schedule. Then COVID hit, and the world shut down, and for a little while Mike had a lot of time on his hands. That’s when this whole journey really got underway
Lemony Snicket came on board later, but his contributions redefined the project in a pretty profound way – and have expanded what we can do with our Illuminated Editions series in general. He’s not just commenting on the story – he’s adding a second story layer, a fictional encounter with a fictional text. It has a hall-of-mirrors effect that’s fitting for a text as wild and unconventional as Pinocchio.
It was sort of a series of sparks that turned into a glorious, towering bonfire, threatening to consume all we hold dear.
Second most general question possible: what is the enduring appeal of Pinocchio? And this version in particular?
Pinocchio is one of the most well-known stories of all time. And yet, oddly, the actual text of Carlo Collodi’s original tale sometimes gets lost amid the cavalcade of adaptations and reimaginings. When readers encounter the original story, they’re sometimes startled – it’s extraordinarily dark, anarchic, bizarre and singular, in a way that doesn’t always translate in adaptations.
With all respect to the many great films and reimaginings, our edition wants to pull you back to Collodi’s text – which is a wild picaresque in which a string of strange and horrific events befall a foolhardy wooden puppet-child, thereby shedding light on the cruelties of society, the redemptions of family, and what it means to be human. The story of Pinocchio, as Collodi told it, is full of betrayals, poisoners and assassins, hideous transformations, accidental deaths and resurrections, and countless other violations and bedevilments to go along with all its magic, musicality, humor and warmth. We hope that our edition uniquely captures some of the chaos and atmosphere that adaptations don’t always touch.
Chicken and egg question: who came on board first, Lemony Snicket or Mike Mignola?
The whole project sort of grew of its own strange accord, based on the incredible creativity of our collaborators.
It was Mike’s vision for his version of Collodi’s puppet-world that launched the entire undertaking. It occurred to us that Lemony Snicket, who wrote the astounding suite of novels known as A Series of Unfortunate Events, would be the perfect author to comment on this book, which is itself a series of quite unfortunate events.
So we asked him for an introduction – but he offered us something so much more fascinating and compelling: a collection of annotations of the text in which he, Snicket, encounters Pinocchio for the first time, and is slowly driven mad by it.
Our innovation was to present these not as traditional footnotes, but as hand-typed slipped-in typesheets, covered with coffee stains and revisions and tell-tale signals of incipient authorial madness. As though Snicket found an existing copy of Pinocchio, marked it up and stuffed it full of notes and ravings. Our art director Maëlle Doliveux typed these herself, on a travel typewriter during a cross-country road trip.
How much coordination was there between the two? Or was it your job to fit the puzzle together, once they had delivered the pieces?
By the time Snicket got involved, Mignola had already finished his portfolio of illustrations. So he was not responding to the text in his drawings. But Snicket did have the full suite of drawings and some sample designs in hand when he wrote his annotations, so he had a strong sense of the world he was entering in this edition, even as he transformed it.
Do you have a favorite bit, either of art or notes, that might fly under the radar that readers should keep their eyes out for?
My favorite illustration may be the image of the fox and the cat lurking outside the inn. So much world-building is done in this simple, elegant illustration, which is charming and unsettling at the same time, like so much of Mike’s work, and like Pinocchio itself. I want to live in the world depicted in this drawing, but then I’m also not sure how long I’d last with sinister characters like that around.As for the notes, I love the recursive nature of them, the way they’re constantly wending back to earlier observations and building on them, the way the themes grow directly out of the soil of Pinocchio. And the language – for my taste, there are very few authors who can construct sentences like Snicket. I particularly love the phrase “Justice is like a marionette–how it works depends largely on who is holding the strings.”
Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition is now on sale in stores everywhere.
