Giant Hands Crush a Traveler — Verne's 'Around the Moon,' Bayard & Neuville, 1870s

Executed by Émile-Antoine Bayard and Henri de Montaut dit Neuville, the French engravers who defined the visual language of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires, this dramatic pen-and-ink illustration employs masterful chiaroscuro to create a nightmarish dreamscape. An impossibly large curly-haired figure looms over a tiny human trapped within a swirling vortex between enormous grasping hands — a surreal vision of cosmic scale and helplessness that anticipates Symbolist art and pulp horror by decades.