Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children: Word/Image Interaction in Illustrated Fiction

As a matter of fact the BSFUC’s intricate and allusive fiction combines and elaborates literary, historical, sociological and sometimes also scientific subjects merging them with popular belief and urban legends.
Since each story contains a wealth of references that sweep from a higher and subtler to a lower cultural level, the plots propose a series of seemingly incredible interconnections of events and other similarly bizarre twisted commonplaces that confront the stories’ protagonists, and implicitly dwell on the detritus of American modern society and culture.
Along with its emphasis on loftier themes such as social issues, existentialism and religion, and its awareness and appropriation of many elements of traditional high culture and literary form, Louapre’s work tends to have elaborate, inventive plots drawing on numerous cultural and sociological ideas at the same time and also demonstrates a strong affinity with the artefacts of low culture, obviously including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, pop music, urban myths and folk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between high and low culture, sometimes defined as ‘deconstruction’, can be also interpreted as one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism.
Whether to consider the BSFUC an example of postmodernist literature or not, it is a matter of fact that Louapre’s well-structured and detailed way of writing incorporates and reformulates a multitude of tendencies that sweep from beat generation’s
innovative writing to black comedy, from educative books for children to the caustic and visionary vocabulary adopted by acclaimed underground writers and music critics16, and often borrows literary oddities and introduces sets of characters and situations that in originality are no way inferior to those we find in Heller, Vonnegut, Barthelme or Pynchon’s rich fictional microcosms.