A is for Ambroseburg

Long, long ago, as the twentieth century was drawing to a close, my friend Mike approached me with an idea. “You know those children’s ABC books,” he wrote (in a typewritten letter delivered via postal service, as was the custom), “I want to do a pastiche of one of those, but with a macabre, grotesque spin to it, and all centered around a small town…” This started a great exchange of drafts, sketches and ideas regarding what is now A is for Ambroseburg (later on, there was a 2-decade period where all this correspondence sat untouched in a box in my closet, but let’s not dwell on that).

Here, to amuse you while I work on letter E, are some of my earliest pencil sketches of A, B, and C. “D is for Dance” was a later addition, so the sketchbook containing these drawings doesn’t include Elias Himmelsbach’s Midnight Festival. The original idea for D was later moved to a letter further down the alphabet, and sharing those drawings now would only spoil the surprise.