Illustrated books offer a unique opportunity for enhanced clarity in narrative delivery. Employing both the power of words and images working in conjunction, they offer the reader both a textual and visual entry point for engagement with the narrative.

Together they offer the reader an opportunity to enrich the narrative experience making for a fuller richer reading experience. Both Missing Persons Bureau and Sam the Tram’s Dance Club provide the reader a narrative and visual journey that is a real delight.

The construction of this latest round of images for Missing Persons Bureau represents a radical departure from the aesthetics of the range of traditional illustrative methodologies. Images with classical proportions and a shared dynamics have, until now, dominated the world of picture book illustration. Dr Clarke has again broken the mould with a series of illustrations that in their detail speak to a range of a reader’s cognitions.

Images From Different Worlds.

The new illustrations for Missing Persons Bureau draw together  powerful images of the worlds that lie beyond fiction. 

In Missing Persons Bureau, images that are drawn from reality sit next to images drawn from fantasy and the imagination. Both then sit next to images drawn from phantasy (Phantasy is the world of the deeply unconscious mind) and its drivers. This is not in itself remarkable. Artists have been drawing on this resource for generations. The word ‘fiction’, in a literary sense, suggests something imagined or made up, something untrue, unreal. This is a well understood quality, yet despite this or indeed because of it, fiction retains an undoubtedly powerful attraction to us all. Fiction  remains an attractive forum for exploration of narrative and of alternative realities. Fiction, unlike the singular nature of a narrative driven by facts allows for the introduction of multiple different alternative realities. It is a small step to acknowledge that fiction can support the introduction of a number of narrative elements that might not stem from one individual. Fictional narrative provides a platform that supports a series of truths or shared experiences or unconscious platforms of shared truths.

The Integration of Alternate Realities.

The images from Missing Persons Bureau do something new and remarkable. They comfortably combine images from alternate realities. The reader experience is made sense of by the presence and the integration of these images into the single narrative framework. In lived experience, events, learnings and emotions can collide with devastating impacts to the individual. The temptation can be to focus on a single set of images from one source rather than accept and work with a plurality of sources. So although these illustrations have been drawn from vastly different worlds, they sit together, page after page, and contribute not just to the sense making journey of the narrative but also to the sensual values of the journey itself. Indeed the journey is enriched  as it unfurls and more understanding is available when the images are cognised as an integral part of the narrative journey. These images enable the narrative journey to occur, they propel the reader along the narrative line of integration. This book provides a second clinical tool for practitioners who are working with clients who may have a resistance to reading the original Sam the Tram’s Dance Club book.