Morse, Scott – Noble Boy

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Noble Boy

First things first here: this book is gorgeous. Seriously, you’re not likely to see a better looking book than this this year, or really in very many other years too. The colors, the layouts, the constantly impish persona of Maurice Noble floating around somewhere on every page… you could stare at this book for hours. It’s the story of Maurice Noble, a man who teamed with Chuck Jones for some of the best cartoons ever produced and did some damned fine work on his own for decades, and it’s also the story of how Scott Morse learned under this master about the craft and about life in general. My problem with this book is a problem I’ve had with other books, and it’s something that I don’t share with most other people: the poetry. The story is told with one full page picture on one side, the text on the other side, but the text is all done in four line rhyming stanzas. At times this works beautifully, and at other times it descends into doggerel, so says the man who mostly doesn’t like poetry anyway, so don’t forget to keep that at the front of your mind. Because that’s the only thing going against this book. The story is fascinating, although it would have been a bit meatier without the poetry and with a few more details, although short word bursts probably work best here with those stunning pictures constantly dragging your eyeballs over to that side of the page. So the bottom line here is that I seem to have just the barest idea of what I’m talking about, and all you have to do to decide if this is something that you’d like is to look at the sample and the cover. $12.95