Sound the alarm and grab your diving bell—we’ve officially sunk to new depths. Submarine Jim, the fourth (!) installment in The Longfellow Adventures, boldly goes where no design sensibility has gone before: straight to the bottom of the ocean and face-first into the Crayola abyss.
The cover art appears to be painted with the fevered determination of someone who just discovered watercolors and wanted to use all of them at once. The centerpiece? A beefy diver with abs of interpretive intention, rocking a golden fishbowl helmet and the dead stare of someone who’s either lost in thought or forgot to draw their own face.
Let’s pause to admire the anatomical experiment that is Jim. His torso is pure unshaded peach with arms that look like twisted pool noodles, one of which is gripping a spear with the confidence of a man who has never held a spear before. His shorts are either crimson swim trunks or very angry seaweed. Below him? Tentacles. So many tentacles. None of them invited.
Meanwhile, chaos bubbles behind him. A man floats upside down like he’s auditioning for Cirque du Soaking Wet. A shipwreck lies conveniently off to the side, next to a sea turtle who’s seen things and wants out. There’s an anchor floating nowhere near physics, a fish staring directly into your soul, and seaweed staging a mutiny in the corner. Every inch of this cover is stuffed with “Why is this here?” energy.
And then we reach the typography, where things really go full Titanic. “Submarine Jim” is styled in a heroic serif font with a drop shadow thicker than a pirate’s accent. It’s slapped on top of an already chaotic background, making it about as readable as an SOS message scribbled on kelp. The subtitle—“Jim’s a Name for Thieves and Scoundrels”—slinks along the bottom like it knows it doesn’t belong here but showed up anyway. It’s both too small and somehow still too loud.
This cover has everything: action, mystery, the artistic spirit of a well-meaning relative who says “I paint as a hobby,” and a narrative that looks like it escaped from a child’s dream journal. The Longfellow Adventures may have legs, but this one is swimming in circles.
Submarine Jim isn’t just a cover. It’s a shipwreck of design choices, a riptide of clashing elements, and a cautionary tale told in brushstrokes and bafflement. Whatever journey this book promises, the real adventure was making it through this cover without needing oxygen.