Charles Vess Illustrating Gaiman's "Instructions"

We're about to be treated: Charles Vess is busy illustrating Neil Gaiman's "Instructions".

If you're not familiar with the poem, it's what to do if you ever find yourself caught in the middle of a fairy tale - what to do, what not to.

Here's an excerpt:

If an eagle gives you a feather, keep it safe.
Remember: that giants sleep too soundly;
that witches are often betrayed by their appetites;
dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always;
hearts can be well-hidden,
and you betray them with your tongue.

You can find the whole poem at the Endicott Studio HERE.

Re the image above: Don't forget to count the black birds...

I also found a video of Mr. Gaiman reading his poem, which you can see below:

It's a deceptively simple poem but there's a lot in there and lovers of fairy tales should have a copy somewhere in their collection.

As for the illustrations, Charles Vess has collaborated with Neil Gaiman many times in the past and is the perfect illustrator to render these images. Gaiman is extremely pleased to have Vess on the project, as you can tell by his post HERE, which also has one of the images as a preview.

You can see some examples here in this post but there are quite a few more. Mr. Vess has kindly posted his WIP drawings for some of the panels at his Green Man Press HERE and you can see a couple of others in his friend's blog HERE.Re the image above: Can you recognize the characters and objects in the illustration? There are more than there first appears to be.

I don't think a release date is set yet but it's definitely next year (2010) sometime.