airplane safety

I love looking at the safety information cards when I ride on planes. I think the drawings are great. Well… I finally mustered up the courage to swipe one and scan it. (I hope nobody dies because I did!)

I’m particularly fascinated by the abstract pictorial narrative of this baby and his lifejacket, rotating and cheering in a purgatory-like void as his mother’s disembodied arms tighten the various straps and buckles. It reminds me of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen.

I also like these drawings because the artists can never draw children well. They always end up making children look like shrunken adults (click to see it bigger):

Perhaps they’re not children, but dwarfs?

I have a story about this picture too:


Back in high school, Doug and I used to play percussion for the Stony Brook Wind Ensemble. Rehearsals were down in the basement of the fine arts building and to get to them we walked past a bunch of art studios. For a project (presumably), somebody had made little stickers out of images from safety pamphlets and had added new (funny) captions. The caption for the picture in the middle read: "Passengers with 80s hair will be cast into the sea."

airplane safety