Call me Ishmael ...

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I’m not sure what the phrase ‘paper engineer’ means, but artist Sam Ita calls himself one. His ‘Moby-Dick: A Pop-Up Book’ (Sterling Publishing: unpaged, $24.95) is a kinder, gentler version of Herman Melville’s 1851 classic, complete with representations of the Pequod, Captain Ahab and the white whale. Think origami stage set in more solid form.

Ita has adapted the story into comics format, and although it’s impossible to do justice to Melville’s lapidary style of narrative, he does manage to get at some of the nuances, using bits of the original text to evoke the novel’s interplay of obsession and insanity.

‘And now concentric circles seized the lone boat itself and all its crew and each floating oar and every lancepole and spinning animate and inanimate all round and round in one vortex carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight,’ we read as Moby-Dick explodes from the book’s center to destroy the ship, the pieces disappearing in a paper whirlpool along the edges of the page.

David L. Ulin