The horrible truth about parenting!
Tales from the Crib was a die-cut, bottle shaped picture book aimed at adults that was written by Henrik Drescher and was made in 1994. This book was basically about portraying the hard life that parents have to go through when raising their children such as being tortured by their children or not enjoying any sexual desires they have for each other.Tales from the Crib provides examples of the following tropes:
- Art Shift: Between the hand drawn characters and the characters who are cut out from newspapers and magazines.
- Babies Ever After: But not in a happy way, since the parents are shown suffering from having children.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: All of the families portrayed in this book are parents suffering from taking care of their children, who are shown to be little devils.
- Black Comedy: Even though the imagery of the kids doing terrible things to their parents is hilarious, it is often at the expense of the parents such as giving them migraines by playing accordion on their heads.
- Darker and Edgier: Compared to Henrik Drescher’s other books that came out during the 1990s as it has sexual imagery and dark themes dealing with parenting, which is surprising since Henrik Drescher usually writes children’s books.
- Driven to Suicide: One image called “Signs of Baby Burnout” shows a father trying to shoot himself in the head.
- Kids Are Cruel: The children in this book were portrayed as little devil like characters as they constantly torture their parents.
- Noodle People: Just like in many Henrik Drescher books, the characters in this book are shown to have wobbly limbs.
- Surreal Humor: The imagery in this book often take the situations quite literally such as the image of various babies literally eating their mother alive when they switched to solid food.
- Toilet Humor: There are some images that show babies pooping in their diapers.
