An Illustrated History of Urban Legends

by Adam Allsuch Boardman (Flying Eye Books, London UK, 2024).

ISBN-10: ‎1838749101; Hardcover, illustrated, bibliography, index, 125 pages.

Timed for release, no doubt, for the holidays, beginning with Halloween 2024, Allan Boardman’s skills in summarizing the entire field of the history of current and not-so-current “urban” folklore is successfully achieved through his masterful illustrations and words in his new book, An Illustrated History of Urban Legends.

The volume is an oversized journey through many stories, fables, and alleged incidents you may have heard before, read about, or seen in sketches, comics, and pictures you have experienced in your life. Boardman nicely organizes them in a subtle approach to critical thinking, obviously penned by a person interested in calmly teaching these lessons to new students of the subject and to young people being introduced to urban legends.

As my focus is on cryptozoology, I will highlight what this book does in that realm via some notes and his illustrations.

With Mothman on the cover, and Bigfoot on the title page, Boardman puts right out there that he is not shying away from cryptozoology.

Since cryptozoologists like *hats, you won’t be surprised to find the “cryptozoologist” looks like he is ready to go bushwhacking. It shows an ufologist smoking a pipe, very Hynek-like. The examples are extreme, but then this is an illustrated history, not a field guide. It is fun, and enjoyable, if not taken too seriously.

For those interested in why field workers do wear *hats, it is well-known among ornithologists and bird-watchers that a cap on one’s head disrupts the outline recognition of birds, and as it turns out, other animals in the bush to the form of a human.

Having been one of the earliest to have found a journalistic citation (1935) for “alligators-in-the-sewers,” this and several other gator illustrations in the book (see the back cover, for example) seem appropriate.

The book has a good assembly of cryptids, and you can see where the text is going to go.

Iconic publications in cryptozoology are highlighted, and the book is welcoming versus hostile to the field of study.

The Patterson-Gimlin footage of a Bigfoot (Bluff Creek, CA; October 20, 1967) is noted, while logical hoaxing is also discussed.

It would be silly for cryptozoology scholars to ignore hoaxes, even if statistically they only account for 5% of the reports.

As I wrote two books on Tom Slick and the search for the Yeti, it is good to see Boardman did ackmowledge Slick. However, of course, the positive evidence that Slick’s expeditions collected is diminished by crediting the Hillary-Perkins findings on bear skins to Slick. That was confusing.

Yetis are treated equally with the Bigfoot hunts, and that is significant.

Being an illustrator of good talent, it is great to see Boardman use his art to overview cryptozoology. His passion is quite apparent.

Cryptozoology gets its own section, although the examples are ones that even cryptozoology scholars are quite happy to file in the dustbin of history. Boardman could have taken the de Loys “Ape” to greater task because it is a terrible racist hoax – and the clever photo is generally known to have been a tailed spider monkey with it tail hidden.

The “cryptid photos” subsection includes some interesting examples, including the Myakka Ape ones I worked tirelessly on.

Allan Boardman does some interesting things with his drawings, for instance, as using a white-bearded Caucasian man for scale in his gallery of cryptids. This seems to reinforce his one line statement that (page 45): “Like ufologists and ghost hunters, cryptozoologists seem to be predominantly white, male, and American.”

I was honored to be included (as #24, “Loren Coleman, cryptozoologist”) in the esteemed company of Boardman’s (“Real”) People of Urban Legend (pp. 116-117).

The characterization of me as a pale academic, however, hints back to the simplification of the demographics of the “predominantly white, male, and American” cryptozoologists (noted on page 45).

Of course, since I was raised with my mother telling me proudly of her Eastern Band Cherokee and Scottish McClain Clan heritage, my demographics seem as camouflaged to Allan Allsuch Boardman as the cryptids are from some zoologists. Ha.

This modified illustration below is how a view of my hidden Native side might slip through from Mr. Boardman’s art.

An Illustrated History of Urban Legends is a book that I highly recommend for all ages, as a teaching tool given as a special gift at this time of year. From Flying Eye Books, 2024, London, UK.

At the International Cryptozoology Museum, we have hardcopies autographed by cryptozoologists for your purchase. Your treasure hunt will be to visit all the “real” urban legend personalities for an autograph and the cryptid locations for your cryptourism adventures. Enjoy the quest.