My inspiration wasn’t the bohemian culture I saw all around me, but a quieter, more bookish one that started when I discovered Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. I found the book on top of one of the garbage cans behind our building. I dumped our trash and began reading on my way back up the stairs. The book begins with a prologue that casts the wandering tattooed man on a hill at dusk with another traveler and ends with an epilogue that finds that traveler running away from the Illustrated Man at dawn. These two pieces are the frame for the 18 classic stories of science fiction that follow. The prologue draws the narrator (and reader) into the artwork on the skin of the Illustrated Man; art made by a female tattoo artist (a rare phenomenon at the time) who is possibly a witch from
the future, and who has marked our man with her choice of “Illustrations.” This art comes to life, tells tales of the future, and finally threatens the narrator. In no other part of any of the stories in-between do these two men or our woman from the framing device appear. Prior to becoming Illustrated, our Man was a carnival worker made unemployable by a broken leg. On a walk (presumably on crutches) he spots a sign. He tells the narrator that he was drawn in by one word: “Illustration.”
“SKIN ILLUSTRATION!
Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic!” “Illustration” is also the provocative promise of his story. It hangs on that word and throughout the “I” in “Illustration” is capitalized. The Illustrated Man is Bradbury’s symbolic embodiment of the lure and connection of story and picture.
The stories that take place between the prologue and epilogue are widely taught and well known. Though there are no actual pictures of any kind, Bradbury’s word paintings imaginatively and eloquently reveal his thoughtful concern with the possible (often grim) future: