“In 1565, twelve years after the death of François Rabelais (1494-1553) — the French Renaissance author best known for his satirical masterpiece The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, the bawdy tale of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel — the Parisian bookseller and publisher Richard Breton brought out Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (The drolatic dreams of Pantagruel). The slim volume, save a short preface from Breton, is made up entirely of images — 120 woodcuts depicting a series of fantastically bizarre and grotesque figures, reminiscent of some of the more inventive and twisted creations of Brueghel or Bosch.”
[…]
“Despite the claims (echoed too in the book’s subtitle), the book’s wonderful images are very unlikely to be the work of Rabelais himself — the attribution probably a clever marketing ploy by Breton. […] The creator of the prints is now widely thought to be François Desprez, a French engraver and illustrator behind two other sets of imaginative designs, similar in style.”
Those prints remind me of Jim Woodring’s stuff.
[Images and commentary from here.]
Tacky Raccoons 