Henry Darger, The Vivian Girls and The Realms of the Unreal

At the folk art museum.
Hidden in Henry's Room: The Secret Life of a Janitor
Google Images.

"At the heart of Darger’s work is the massive tale, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Begun around 1910, In the Realms of the Unreal took Darger over twenty years to complete and provided the foundation for his art for the rest of his life. The story follows the misadventures of his seven heroines—the Vivian sisters, aged five to eight—as they fight countless battles in a war of good against evil.

Through tracing, carbon copying, and collage, Darger appropriated elements of popular culture to create the mural-sized collages and drawings that illustrated the fantastical scenes of In the Realms of the Unreal . He lifted settings, figures, flora, and fauna from children’s books, comics, newspapers, and magazines. Breathing life info the figures, he added personalized touches that divorced them from their original contexts: little girls gained penises or were given bird or butterfly wings and ram horns to form “Blengiglomeanean Spirits,” creatures who aided the Vivian girls in battle.

Darger was a fervent collector, and his one bedroom apartment was filled with his writings, art, and source materials. His complex drawings, which were stitched together to form compositions up to nine and a half feet in length, were so large that they could not be opened in the small apartment. Instead, they were stored in a stack on the artist’s bed; Darger himself slept in a chair. Yet there was an underlying order to this seemingly chaotic environment. Darger’s attention to detail can be seen in the way he handled his supplies. He attached individual labels to small paint pots to identify the colors inside. He gave whittled down pencils extending devices so that every last stub could be used. He transformed coloring books or even city phonebooks into receptacles for his collected imagery, filling every page with clippings and bundling the scrapbooks in stacks bound by twine." Source.