Vortex. aka The Frog Spinner.  Meet the Delvaux twins, Maryse and Jean-Loup.  Jean-Loup doesn’t do anything much; he’s a bit of a nogoodnik flâneur, really, but he’s very pretty, very clever and he throws the best tea parties in & around that neck of the woods.  His sister Maryse is a professional frog spinner. She spins frogs, that’s what she does. She throws a handful of young frogs (sometimes infant wyrms) into the Vortex and makes them whirl and turn and twirl all the way to the bottom of the funnel until they vanish and reappear in the adjacent dimension, where they are picked up by the Shoggoths and their trusty inter-dimensional minibus, the Colometa, and returned safe and sound to their homes, their mothers and their choir practice. All the girl frogs and girl wyrms love Jean-Loup because of his good looks and his tea parties and his delightful crappy jokes. The boy frogs are not exactly enamoured of Maryse but they submit with good grace to this bizarre practice of being spun because it gives them kudos with the girl frogs and earns them extra cuddles from their mothers and the odd exemption from choir practice. The frog mothers thoroughly approve of this rotating caper, for it’s demonstrated that it fortifies the hide and tones down the superfluous testosterone; also, it gets the kids off their hands for a while without the venomous side-effects of day-time telly.

This wee Loony Tune is for my friend Maryse, who loved Mercí¨ Rodoreda and with whom I lost touch some time ago, unfortunately. Here’s looking at you, kid!   NB. No frogs were harmed in the making of this illustration.