In 1967, artist Ralph Steadman — whose freewheeling design would go on to be synonymous with Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — drew an edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Just like Salvador Dalí, here was an illustrator whose style was a custom fit for Carroll's phantasmagoric fantasy world.


Steadman's version has gone through various print runs throughout the decades, and he modeled several of the characters on decidedly modern personalities. For example, the Cheshire Cat is a television talking head, the Caterpillar is a grass-smoking pedant, the Mad Hatter is a barking quizmaster, and the King and Queen of Hearts are a melting mass of political authority:

The Monarch having evolved or developed into a shapeless mass of hangers-on, the State, H.M. Forces, the Church, the establishment walking on one pair of very well-worn legs. The King and Queen born into it and enveloped in it and lost in it, obliged to go through the motions automatically but surprising even themselves by their own outbursts.


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Additionally, Steadman provided artwork to Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. Here are some illustrations from that book.





Via these sites: 1, 2, 3, 4. Hat tip to Hypnosifl!