Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Anansi the Spider stories


I posted a picture of a spider back around Halloween time. This is Anansi, a character with as much or more literary history than Charlotte of "the Web' and Brer Rabbit to whom he is related. Stories about Anansi, the trickster, come from West Africa. Clever Anansi who usually appears as a spider often has his trick backfire in some comical way.
I illustrated one of the Anansi stories for Childrens Press as part of the Adventures in Storytelling series. The cover art shown above has all the characters who appear in the story, the Sky God, a snake, a hornet, a leopard, and the spider.