Henry Darger’s body was found in 1972 in his Chicago home—which during his life he had rarely left except to go to Mass, sometimes as often as 5 times a day—in a state as undistinguished as it would seem the artist’s existence had been. The landlord, upon noticing that, for the first time in 47 years, Darger’s rent was late, went to his home on Webster Avenue, and was concerned when Henry did not come to the door. Never having needed his key in those 47 years, he had lost it, and the police had to come and kick down the heavy oak door. It would be years before the scene they discovered could be properly accounted for: Henry was sitting in a barber’s chair facing the television, which was on, he had a book open in his hands, and there was an open liter bottle of Coca-Cola, no longer fizzy, next to his glasses on the floor. In his studio, which took up part of the living room and kitchen, they found one of the most obsessive, voluminous, and complete works in the history not only of literature but that of painting, music, and of comics, too. This included: a typewritten manuscript, single-spaced and exceeding 15,000 pages; more than 300 watercolor paintings in pastel shades and of enormous dimension; images of saints; newspaper cuttings; and an impossible ledger providing an account of the weather in Chicago every day for 10 years, and which he had taken the trouble to name The Book of Weather Reports—with the attendant suggestion that, for Darger, everything that happened in his life was in itself art. It seemed that the 300 watercolors were meant as the illustrations for the novel The Story of Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. An epic tale set on an imaginary planet in which 7 child princesses from the kingdom of Abbiennia—the Vivian Girls—take on an army of adult Glandelians responsible for enslaving and torturing children. The watercolors include scenes of extreme violence, of girls being impaled, disemboweled, and tortured, and others of naked girls frolicking in fields of flowers, complete with gigantic, pastel-shade, gold-edged butterfly wings. Interestingly, these girls, naked except for leather shoes and embroidered socks, also have small penises. One theory is that Darger had never been in an intimate relationship with a woman, due to an obsessive fear that they might turn out to be the sister he had never met. Others think he took inspiration from depictions of the baby Jesus. Obsessed with description, he went into great detail on all the battles, giving names to each of the hundreds of soldiers, describing and drawing each of their uniforms, the flags, horses, and butterflies, to the point of making up anthems for each of the different countries and drill songs for all the troops. When he was found, sitting in a barber’s chair, a liter bottle of no-longer-fizzy Coca-Cola on the floor by his glasses, the book he was holding was Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. On the television a very young Michael Jackson was telling an interviewer that what he liked, far more than singing songs, was having friends.