Tarot Corrumpe

Marcel Ruijters's Tarot Corrumpe is, in the review's efficient summary, humorous, sacrilegious and just plain weird: twenty-four cards, the standard majors plus Truth and Intuition, ordered following the Dutch 'restored order' tradition, which reshuffles the trumps according to its own esoteric logic. Ruijters is a Dutch underground comics artist with a medievalist streak, and the deck reads accordingly: woodcut grotesquerie, monastic satire, the sacred and scatological sharing a border as they did in actual medieval margins. The restored-order homage is the connoisseur's joke: mocking tarot while citing its most obscure structural heresy is mockery from deep inside the literature. Underground-comics tarot is its own small tradition, and this is a proper specimen. It suits comix collectors, medievalists who know what marginalia really contained, Dutch-art followers, and readers whose reverence includes room for blasphemy. The easily scandalized should take the deck's name as the fair warning it is.