Children of the 60s, 70s, and 80s know Tomi Ungerer as an illustrator of kids’ books like “Flat Stanley,” “The Mellops” series, and “Crictor.” But Ungerer is more than an illustrator — and much of his work is not kid-friendly.
Starting in the 1960s, Ungerer created political posters and satirical cartoons that viciously attacked the violent, grotesque and depraved parts of modern life. After the massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, Ungerer’s work seems especially timely.
What links Ungerer’s political posters, his satirical cartoons and his darker-than-average children’s books is that interest in representing the “underside of things.” “He wants to give life to the repressed, to the abnormal, to what we consider the taboo,”
