One boy is convinced that the world simply ends, as the map implies, while the other insists that this would be impossible. My favorite, “Our Expedition,” is about a pair of brothers who disagree over what lies beyond the edge of a map their father keeps in his car. Each story is an exercise in narrative concision - the characters are vivid and original, the plots blend logic and whimsy, and the endings always pay off, if never quite the way you expect.

“Tales From Outer Suburbia” is a collection of illustrated stories about, among other things, a water buffalo who hangs out in a vacant lot and gives directions to local kids stick figures who get beaten up by neighborhood bullies a giant dugong that appears on someone’s lawn and the lonely fate of all the unread poetry that people write - it joins a vast “river of waste that flows out of suburbia.” This last story, by the way, is presented as a flotilla of random scraps that “through a strange force of attraction” come together, the word “naturally” meeting the phrase “many poems are” and then “immediately destroyed.”įor all his talents as an illustrator, Tan also writes extremely well. His work is weird, all right, but the best kind of weird - the kind that welcomes you in. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the Future contest. illustration from “Tales From Outer Suburbia”Ī 35-year-old writer and illustrator from Australia, Tan has received many awards for his work, including, I learned from Wikipedia, one from the L.

Outer suburbia