Hans Jurgen Press - "The Adventures of the Black Hand Gang"
Some interesting pages of art from a children's book called The Adventures of the Black Hand Gang, written and drawn by Hans Jurgen Press. At first glance I thought it merely a picture book, but quickly realized the illustrations more often than not took the form of comic book pages, which piqued my interest. Additionally, the pages weren't simply illustrating the text, but were meant to be studied by the reader for clues (from wikipedia: "Press was one of the inventors of the Wimmelbild, a genre of illustration deliberately overcrowded with detail, to pleasure children on their search for a certain item.") And the panels of each page aren't always a straighforward sequence of events, but instead a more complex variety of schematics, POVs, close-ups, etc. which I imagine would be of great fascination for a curious child or semi-literate adult such as myself.
Anyway, it's a beautifully cartooned book, and a thick one - tempted to call it a graphic novel? - about 100 pages, every other one being a full page of art. This American edition is from 1977, while the author's copyright says 1965.
