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Untitled painting by Serbian Surrealist Ljuba Popovic (1934–2016). I missed the announcement of Popovic’s death last year. • Bryan Washington on the radical grace of Gengoroh Tagame: My Brother’s Husband and the tradition of gay manga. Where bara artists are concerned, I favour the work of Mentaiko Itto. Bruno Gmünder recently published a collection in […]

Piazzetta San Marco by Moonlight (no date) by Friedrich Paul Nerly. • RIP Heathcote Williams (Guardian obit, NYT obit): poet, playwright, actor, artist, anarchist, stage magician, and no doubt many other things besides. Being a product of the counter-culture, and one of Britain’s foremost anti-establishment writers (his polemics against the Royal Family were unceasing), Williams […]

Art Nouveau is never far from these pages or from my own work, as has been the case this week when work-related research turned up this recent addition to the scanned books at the Internet Archive. Hector Guimard is best known today for his entrances to the Paris Metro not all of which survived the […]

Dandelion (2009) by Tomoko Kashiki. • “Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly modernizes them, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to take advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.” • Obscenity and the Arts, a previously […]

Once again I’m a little behind with putting new pieces of work on these pages, a consequence of the reduced rate of posting and the delay between finishing various works and them being announced by publishers. Under the Pendulum Sun is a fantasy novel by Jeannette Ng whose cover was revealed this week by Angry […]

Il Fascino Della Morte (1988) by Albin Brunovsky. • One of the forthcoming books featuring my cover art is Behold! Oddities, Curiosities, & Undefinable Wonders, a story collection due to be published next month by Crystal Lake Publishing. Bleeding Cool talked to editor Doug Murano about the collection and its contributors. • Six episodes of […]

Portrait of James Joyce (1929) by Constantin Brancusi. A post for Bloomsday. Joyce’s writing was always concerned more with words and phonics than with the appearance of things—understandable given his failing eyesight—but throughout his life he was a persistently attractive subject for portraits and caricatures. This was partly a consequence of being surrounded by artists […]

Stop-Motion Happening with The Focus Groop is a new album by The Focus Group (now a Groop, apparently, à la Stereolab), and the next release on the Ghost Box label. Design, as always, by Julian House. • At Dennis Cooper’s: Sypha presents…Voyager en Soi-Même: a Tribute to JK Huysmans’ Là-Bas. Related: Henry Chapront’s illustrations for […]

Not the first time Walter Crane has been featured here but this slim volume (62 pages) is a useful overview of the artist’s work which covers all aspects of his career: fine art, book illustration, political design (Crane was a lifelong Socialist), textiles for William Morris, and interior design. There’s more Walter Crane at Wikimedia […]

The Constant Drumbeat of Terrible News (no date) by Allison Sommers. • Nadia Khomami on Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty, an exhibition at the British Library. Related: Simon McCallum‘s potted history of LGBT characters on British screens. Elsewhere: writer and philanthropist Chuck Forester on gay sex in the 1970s. • The Panic Fables: Mystic […]

A mural for Forest For The Trees, 2016, by Yoshi47. • “Who’s the real cunt?” Andrew O’Hagan on the Daily Mail‘s hypocrisies, Little England bigotries and omni-outrage in a review of Mail Men: The Unauthorised Story of the ‘Daily Mail’, the Paper that Divided and Conquered Britain by Adrian Addison. • Deutschlandspiegel 198/1971: a short […]

Continuing an occasional series in which illustrators of Lautréamont’s baleful masterwork are noted. Santiago Caruso’s paintings provide suitably grotesque embellishments to a Spanish edition of Maldoror which was published in 2016 by Valdemar. The book is part of their Gótica collection which includes many fine works of weird fiction including titles by contemporary writers such […]

The Future Vol.2 (2016) by f1x-2. • One of the notable things about the reaction to the original series of Twin Peaks was the way in which Americans were astonished that something so outré could be allowed on television. Here in the UK the response was a little more subdued; we had, after all been […]

Man, Myth & Magic #1, January 1970; McCall’s, March 1970. The announcement last week of the death of British character actor Geoffrey Bayldon prompted some discussion here about the typeface used for the titles of Bayldon’s TV series from the early 1970s, Catweazle. This was a humorous drama in which the actor portrayed a warlock […]

Threshold (2008) by Roku Sasaki. • A previously unseen interview with Angela Carter from 1979 in which she talks to David Pringle about her evolution as a writer, literary influences and genre fiction. • Among the highlights in the latest edition of Wormwood there’s Doug Anderson on Panacea by Robert Aickman, a “vast unpublished philosophical […]

Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (And/Or Press, 1977). John Thompson’s detailed, mystical and erotic illustrations gained prominence in the San Francisco comic scene in the late 1960s–early 1970s, appearing in a handful of titles drawn in their entirety by Thompson or done as collaborations with local artists including Robert Crumb. But it’s as […]

An urban scene from Yotsuba&! by manga artist Kiyohiko Azuma. • The resurgence of interest in Alice Coltrane’s music is very welcome even if she joins for the moment the list of those artists (usually women: see Leonora Carrington) tagged by editors as “lost”, “forgotten”, “unrecognised”, etc. Alice Coltrane was only ever lost if you weren’t paying […]

Arthur Zaidenberg’s Masereel-like renderings of Decadent icon Des Esseintes appear here for the second time courtesy of a recent upload at the Internet Archive. Zaidenberg’s illustrations were for a 1931 edition of Huysmans’ novel, and the copies I linked to back in 2008 were rather fuzzy and low-res compared to these scans. The earlier collection does, […]

Painted beetle (2016) by Akihiro Higuchi. • David Horbury: The Tate’s Queer British Art exhibition ignores the pioneering scholarship of Emmanuel Cooper, author of The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the last 100 years in the West (1986). • L’Androgyne Alchemique is an exhibition at the Azzedine Alaïa Gallery, Paris, by pascALEjandro, a collaboration […]

Die Buecher der Chronika der drei Schwestern (The Books of the Chronicles of the Three Sisters) is a German fairy tale set down by Johann Karl August Musäus, and presented here in a 1900 edition illustrated by Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban. Lefler and Urban were brothers-in-law who worked as set designers as well as […]