Aesop Cop, Volume One

Aesop Cop is a collaboration between Franklin Crawford, who scans police logs around the world (mostly in his hometown of Ithaca, N.Y.) and writes an Aesop-inspired morality poem about notable crimes, and Rigel Stuhmiller, a Berkeley, CA-based artist, who illustrates the poems. These oddball transgressions are handled with a charmingly light tough. The verses are often as absurd as the police report. The illustrations take the whole business into a mythical world where jealous men wearing dead weasels deliver frontier justice to their bewildered foes, fathers and sons seek revenge upon assailants in community ERs and Russian hairdressers turn armed robbers into sex slaves. As Aesop himself would say: Buy this book, you shant regret it: Curiosity did not kill the cat, but rather fed it! We agree!