Meg and Mr. Jenkins

I’m sorry for the long radio silence; work and moving and several major projects have kept me with very little time to do anything else. I did this small piece of fanart for Madeline L’Engle’s A WIND IN THE DOOR as a way to relax. This is Meg Murry and her nemesis, her former principal Mr. Jenkins. If I didn’t know better, I would almost think that Meg has some kind of weird crush on the guy, given how she’s always described as feeling strange and not knowing what to do with her hands when she meets him. (Is there such a thing has a hate-crush?)

The story was written in the early ’70s, almost twelve years after A WRINKLE IN TIME, and is correspondingly dated. It was hard not to imagine everyone in early ’70s fashions, even though the story is set in the near future, after the exploration of Mars. The scent of patchouli almost rises off the page. (I think Mr. Jenkins looks a bit like a young Jonathan Pryce, circa BRAZIL, or maybe a bit like Mr. Anrack from HEAVY METAL.)