Humpty Dumpty by EB Thurstan (1930).

A preoccupation of the past couple of weeks has been Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as I’ve been working on an Alice in Wonderland project which I’ll unveil shortly. Looking around at some of the numerous visual interpretations of the stories I came across two portfolios I hadn’t seen before by comic artist Frank Brunner. These are from the late Seventies, and typically for that decade they work an erotic twist on the books by adding ten years to Alice’s age whilst depriving her of clothes. Nudity aside, Brunner’s drawings don’t depart from tradition very much—or add much, for that matter—but I did notice that he’d based his Humpty Dumpty figure on an earlier version by illustrator EB Thurstan.

Humpty Dumpty by Frank Brunner (1978?).

The reason Thurstan’s Humpty is so familiar is that I’d borrowed it myself for one of the many appearances by the character in the Lord Horror comic series, Reverbstorm. Humpty’s presence there would involve too much explanation so you’ll have to be satisfied with the character who explains Jabberwocky remaining inexplicable. As for Brunner’s drawings, you can see coloured versions on his website.

Humpty Dumpty from Reverbstorm #3 (1994).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Mighty Baby (1969). Illustration by Martin Sharp.

Yet another album cover prompts this post, part of an occasional series. Mighty Baby were a British rock band who formed out of psychedelic group The Action in the late Sixties, and their music is fairly typical of the period, being “heavy” without any of the psych trappings which—for me—often make everything from that time a lot more interesting. This was a journey undertaken by many groups at the end of that lurid decade, a junking of the playful and evocative side of what was now called rock music in favour of a denim-clad earnestness. This album isn’t one I like very much—I’d rather listen to their earlier incarnation—but the cover painting by psych artist Martin Sharp is certainly a startling piece, being a violent mutation of one of the most famous Tarzan drawings by comic artist Burne Hogarth.

Tarzan by Burne Hogarth (194?).

Hogarth was drawing Tarzan for much of the 1940s and this particular panel showing the Ape-Man attacking Numa the lion dates from the latter part of his run on the series. I wish I could pin this to an actual year but I don’t have a complete set of the comics and that detail eluded me. If anyone knows the date, please leave a comment.

Reverbstorm 7 (2000).

Readers of the Savoy comics series, Reverbstorm, which David Britton and I created in the 1990s, will be familiar with its many references to Hogarth and other artists (some of which were catalogued here). The image of Tarzan and Numa was reworked on three separate occasions. The first was a double-page piece in a long run of pages which are the most excessive and outrageous things I’ve drawn to date. Burne Hogarth saw some of this work, including this spread, and while he wasn’t impressed at all by the violence he had the good grace to say some very flattering things about my drawing.

That image of Lord Horror on the solar-phallic lion was reworked for the cover painting in a style intended to resemble the work of Frank Frazetta. This version also tries to match Hogarth’s original more closely.

Near the end of Reverbstorm #7 one finds this panel showing Jessie Matthews astride Picasso’s bull from Guernica (1937) in the midst of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884). How the story gets to a point of such intertextual confusion would involve far too much explanation; the curious will just have to buy the comics, or wait for the definitive book edition to appear.

I’m fairly sure I’ve seen other reworkings of Hogarth’s drawing aside from the Sharp version. If anyone knows of others, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #10: Victor Moscoso
• Design as virus #9: Mondrian fashions
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• My pastiches
• A premonition of Premonition

Fortunate Londoners can get to see a new exhibition, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was, which runs at The Drawing Room until October 25, 2009. As well as production designs from concept artists Moebius, HR Giger and Chris Foss, there’s newly commissioned work by artists Steven Claydon, Matthew Day Jackson and Vidya Gastaldon.

Jodorowsky’s proposed 1976 adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel is now the stuff of legend, and it’s possible that his outrageously ambitious plans are more fun to dream about than they would have been on the screen. But it remains a tantalising prospect that Jodorowsky might well have pulled off a science fiction equivalent of Fellini’s Satyricon. Either way, along with Stanley Kubrick’s unmade Napoleon, it’s one of the great lost film of the 1970s.

Among Jodorowsky’s proposed cast were Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali, the last of whom was to play the Emperor of the Universe, who ruled from a golden toilet-cum-throne in the shape of two intertwined dolphins. Unable to secure the money from Hollywood to create the ‘Dune’ of his imagination, Jodorowsky abandoned the film before a single frame was shot. All that survives of this project is Jodorowsky’s extensive notes, and the production drawings of Moebius, Giger and Foss. These reveal a potential future for sci-fi movie making that eschewed the conservative, technology-based approach of American filmmakers in favour of something closer to a metaphysical fever-dream.

left: Emperor Shaddam IV; right: Feyd Rautha.

Moebius’s designs are wildly different from those used in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation (which I like nonetheless). His sketch of the Emperor on the left gives some idea of how Salvador Dalí might have appeared in the film, while the figure on the right is Baron Harkonnen’s effete nephew, Feyd, a far more radical conception than the grinning fool played by Sting in the Lynch version. There’s a lot more of Moebius’s sketches at the excellent Dune.info site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí and Film
• Jodorowsky on DVD

Mysterieux retour du Capitaine Nemo.

This week has been incredibly hectic work-wise but I’ve managed to keep these posts going, so here’s the last one devoted to an appreciation of the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. A week of posts barely scratches the surface of their vast and involved creation of alternate worlds, fantasy design and architecture, and Borges-like metaphysical speculation. When I try to explain my disaffection with the popular end of American comics, it’s works such as these which I offer as an alternative. The problem, of course, is that only a handful of the books have been translated into English, a detail which tells you all you need to know about English-speaking comics publishers and—since demand fuels the market—their readers.

This final set of pictures is a selection from Schuiten and Peeters’ L’Echo des Cités (1993), a facsimile edition of the main newspaper which serves the cities of the Obscure World. Unfortunately, this remains untranslated but the bulk of the book is full-page illustrations, many of which are among Schuiten’s best. A number of these were later reprinted as limited lithograph prints.

Les rêves engloutis d’Oscar Frobelius.

Les oublies de Blossfeldtstad.

Les naufrages du Battista.

Sauvés!

La resurrection du Lac Vert.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Further tales from the Obscure World
• Brüsel by Schuiten & Peeters
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

L’enfant penchée.

We’re at the penultimate post in this week-long tribute to the Cités Obscures series of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and there isn’t enough space left to cover some of the more recent volumes in detail. What follows is a quick skate through three more major works.

L’enfant penchée.

L’enfant penchée (1996), or The Leaning Child, is an expanded version of a 1995 children’s story by Schuiten and Peeters, Mary la penchée. Mary is the young daughter of wealthy industrialists from Mylos struck down one day by some cosmic calamity which permanently shifts her centre of gravity, causing her to permanently lean at an apparently impossible angle. When she’s bullied at school she runs away and winds up as a circus performer, until a meeting with scientists and astronomers leads to a resolving of her affliction and the repairing of her ruined life. This is a fascinating story for a number of reasons, not least the existence of a parallel narrative taking place in our world which is conveyed using photographs, and which unveils some of the metaphysical aspects of the Obscure World. The story of Mary is also flawlessly drawn, with Schuiten using a black-and-white style modelled on the work of old magazine illustrators like Franklin Booth, and there are further references to Winsor McCay and Jules Verne.

L’ombre d’un homme.

L’ombre d’un homme (1999) or The Shadow of a Man concerns another ruined life, this time the tale of Albert Chamisso, an insurance agent in the city of Blossfeldtstad whose shadow becomes coloured until it’s more like a reflection than a shadow, leading Chamisso to lose his job and suffer social ostracism. In Blossfeldtstad, Schuiten gives us a city whose buildings—in the “Vegetalistic Style”—are beautiful Art Nouveau skyscrapers based on the famous plant photographs of Karl Blossfeldt. No airships in this metropolis, instead winged flying machines fill the skies.

La frontière invisible

La frontière invisible (2002, 2004) is a two-book story about a young cartographer who goes to work at the enormous dome of the Centre for Cartography in the Somonites desert. One of the women working there has a birthmark on her body which turns out to match a map of crucial geo-political import. When the centre is invaded by an army, the pair go on the run. This is a less stimulating story than some of the earlier works, with writer and artist giving us another hermetic community of scholars. However, it does gives Schuiten an opportunity to concentrate on landscapes rather than architecture. There are also further unusual modes of transport, including two-person monorail bicycles which the map-makers use to travel around their vast workplace.

One last post about the Obscure World tomorrow.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Brüsel by Schuiten & Peeters
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Karl Blossfeldt
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

The Palace of Justice, Brussels.

Brüsel (1992) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters follows La route d’Armilia as the next major work concerning the Cités Obscures. As with La Tour, this is a longer story where it isn’t immediately apparent that we’re in the Obscure World at all, although Brüsel is clearly an alternate version of our Brussels. The unfinished Palace of the Three Powers in the city centre is modelled on the Palace of Justice in Brussels, and both buildings share architects by the name of Joseph Poelaert.

The Palace of the Three Powers, Brüsel.

Brüsel is a “small man” tale of Constant Abeels, a florist with a persistent cough who becomes enmeshed in the schemings to transform the city, and the resistance to those plans. It’s also a satire on the overly-optimistic march of progress of the late 19th and early 20th century and the problems of trying to impose sudden architectural change on a community. Inhabitants of Brussels have a long history of sudden architectural change; the huge Palace of Justice was constructed only after residents of the area had been forcibly evicted. In the 1950s and 60s, the flattening of old quarters in order to build office blocks was so destructive that the French coined the term “Brusselisation” to describe a brutal remodelling of a city against the wishes of its citizens.

The city planners wandering through a model of the future city.

Schuiten and Peeters show Brusselisation at work in its most extreme form, with a city of winding streets completely demolished and replaced by soaring Art Deco skyscrapers. A small core of residents are against this, among them a young woman, Tina Tonero, who Abeels meets at the Palace and who works with a resistance group daubing slogans on posters which show the future Brüsel. If there’s a recurrent flaw in Schuiten and Peeters’ stories it’s the continual ease with which attractive young women fall immediately for not-so-attractive older men, and Brüsel is another example of this pattern. One occurrence would be passable but it seems to happen so often it starts to look more like wish-fulfilment for the reader than realistic behaviour, especially in Brüsel when Tina manages to lose most of her clothes at an opportune moment.

The Palace now surrounded by new construction.

That complaint aside, Brüsel casts a satiric eye over all its characters and looks unsentimentally at the unhealthy city of the past, with a river whose miasmas give Abeels his persistent cough, and a hospital where nuns apply leeches to their patients. The new hospital which replaces the old isn’t much better when the doctors are inattentive cranks if they’re present at all. The careful reader is rewarded with some subtle connections to earlier stories; in the airship office of the oligarch de Vrouw we see the painting of the Tower of Babel from La Tour, a symbol of the businessman’s hubris. Later in the modern hospital there’s a glimpse of an older Robick from La fièvre d’Urbicande, now muttering to himself about the Network as he scribbles in a book, a victim of prior architectural squabbles. Schuiten and Peeters love their buildings but they’re fully aware that in the Obscure World, as in our own, the reshaping of cities is never going to be an easy matter.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

Ferdinand and Hella look down on the skyscrapers of Brüsel.

La route d’Armilia (1988) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the next substantial story in the Cités Obscures series after La Tour; there was also a book about transportation in the Obscure World, L’Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir, published the same year. La route d’Armilia is the book where Schuiten and Peeters’ Jules Verne influence comes to the fore, with the story of a young boy whose name is derived from Verne characters, Ferdinand Robur Hatteras, undertaking an airship journey to Armilia at the Obscure World’s northern pole. As with the earlier L’archivist, this is mainly an excuse for Schuiten to demonstrate his prodigious architectural invention and draughtsmanship, although the story this time is more of a piece. The journey takes us from the city of Mylos—a dismal place of factories, chimneys and smoke, like one of the polluted cities of the early Industrial Revolution—over the cities of Porrentruy, Mukha, Brüsel, Bayreuth, Calvani, Genova and København. Each city is substantially different from the last, and one of the pleasures is seeing what the next stop along the way will be like.

left: the airship passes through the canyon streets of Porrentruy; right: in Brüsel a woman hangs perilously from a ledge. Acrobatics or accident, we never discover which.

The story itself seems rather slight at first, like a Verne tale for children, with the airship crossing desert regions, ocean and ice fields, observing various spectacles along the way. Ferdinand has been given the task of conveying a special code to Armilia which will help correct some machinery there whose operation somehow affects the whole of the Obscure World and whose nature is only revealed near the end. Why a small boy is given this important task is one of a number of conundrums in an ostensibly light narrative which only reveals its truer, darker nature at the conclusion. As with some of the other stories in this series, to say more would be to spoil it for would-be readers. During the journey Ferdinand discovers a girl, Hella, who has managed to stow herself away on the airship, a detail which reinforces the children’s story aspect, as well as the Verne-like narrative.

left: the Winsor McCay-like pleasure city of København; right: Mount Glaëver.

Tempting as it is to see this story as a comment on adventure tales, its the travelogue quality which is the most important for the artist, and Schuiten fills his pages with stunning views of the cities. Many of these pictures are so beguiling you immediately want to know more about the places they depict, although it’s a shame for me that the city of Calvani (possibly named in homage to Italo Calvino) is only glimpsed through a window. Schuiten has a fondness for greenhouses and terrariums, and it’s no surprise that Laeken in Brussels contains a splendid example of the former. Calvani is a city of elegant greenhouses built to skyscraper proportions, and while we might not enjoy a decent view of the city in this story, a whole page is devoted to Mount Glaëver, a peak in a waste of snow and ice whose summit is capped with glass spires enclosing trees and other vegetation. By this point in their books, Schuiten and Peeters resist the temptation to go into too much detail about these enigmatic structures, and they leave them all the more fascinating as a result.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

La Tour (1987) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the third story in the Cités Obscures series, although it’s the fourth volume if you want to be strictly canon about things, L’achivist, a guide to places in the Obscure World, having preceded it.

Carcere Oscura by Piranesi (1750).

This is another book where Schuiten and Peeters’ interests tick a list of my own obsessions, being a tale which seems to originate in the question “What would it be like if you crossed Piranesi’s Prisons etchings with Brueghel’s Tower of Babel?” The protagonist of La Tour, Giovanni Battista, has his name borrowed from Piranesi’s forenames and his appearance taken from Orson Welles’ Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight. The story owes something to Kafka, although it lacks Kafka’s drift towards paradox, concerning a colossal building referred to throughout as The Tower, a structure we only ever see in close-up—and then mostly from the inside—but whose height must reach several thousand feet.

Battista (above) is one of the Keepers, a group of men charged with maintaining small sections of the Tower whose structure suffers continual decay and collapse. Tired of years spent in complete isolation, and concerned that other Keepers aren’t doing their job, Battista goes in search of the Tower’s feared Inspectors, only to discover that the lack of maintenance is endemic and few of the Tower’s scattered residents have any idea of the origin or purpose of the vast building where they’ve spent their lives, never mind a concern for its upkeep. There are no Inspectors, and while Battista is worried at the beginning about vines in the stonework, we later see small forests growing among the ruins. Kafka resonances come with the mention of the mysterious Base, and the equally mysterious Pioneers, those builders and engineers who went ahead years or even centuries before, climbing skyward.

It’s a surprise reading this book after the first two with their late 19th and early 20th century appearance. The world of La Tour is quite medieval, especially the small community in which Battista finds himself after a near-fatal fall from a jerry-rigged kite. The most sophisticated technology we see is in the home of a doctor, Elias, whose house contains histories of the Tower’s construction as well as astrolabes and armillary spheres. (The latter device plays a key role in a later story.) The only clue we’re in the Obscure World at all comes with a close view of a polyhedral globe which shows the Tower on one face with the cities of Xhystos and Samaris on the others. Aside from Elias, none of the inhabitants of the Tower are aware of, or curious about, anything outside their vast building.

Elias also has a collection of paintings which show the history of the Tower’s design. Several of these are Schuiten’s variations on famous pictures, including the Brueghel Tower of Babel. Less familiar is a version of the curious Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867-88) by Erastus Salisbury Field. The paintings in the Tower are distinguished by being shown in colour while everything else is black-and-white, a distinction used later in the story to striking effect.

Historical Monument of the American Republic by Erastus Salisbury Field (1867–88).

This is a far longer book than the previous ones, and its final third concerns a fascinating journey of several weeks by Battista and a young woman, Milena, up the Tower in search of the Pioneers. Once again, I don’t want to spoil the story but it rather runs out of steam at the end; as with Les Murailles de Samaris there’s a feeling that the creators weren’t sure what to do with their splendid creation once they’d invented it. But the drawing more than makes up for that, with Schuiten once again showing an apparently effortless mastery of a given style, superbly rendering walls of Piranesian vastness, Chartres-like flying buttresses and masses of cross-hatched shading. The journey to the top of the Tower—and the return down—is worth it for the view alone.

• Piranesi / Schuiten. Arquitectura, Comics y Clasicismo | A Spanish examination of Piranesi’s influence on Schuiten.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

La fièvre d’Urbicande (1985) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the second volume in the Cités Obscures series. This was the one which captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he discusses his plans to unify the city’s separate halves by extending the design of the city’s southern half into the chaotic northern section.

Urbicande is built on the steeply-sloped banks of a river, with the rational, rectilinear southern bank exposed to the sun while the northern bank is a place of shadow and mists. Traffic between the two halves is strictly controlled by the administrators of the south who fear the chaos the north represents. The style of the southern region is a superb imagining of an Art Deco metropolis while on the north bank we see an older place of winding lanes and dishevelled buildings. In Robick’s foreword he refers to former “masters” who happen to be people from our world, architect Étienne-Louis Boullée and architectural renderer and theorist Hugh Ferriss. Mention of Ferriss was a surprise since he isn’t so well-known outside the architectural sphere. I’ve previously discussed his Metropolis of Tomorrow which is obviously a big influence for Schuiten.

Urbicande is thrown into turmoil and near-anarchy when a small cube of some unknown material excavated in the desert is left in Robick’s office and begins to unaccountably grow, shooting out buds which form replicas of itself. The substance is invulnerable yet also passes through material objects with ease, and an evolving mesh (named The Network) of structure is soon growing from Robick’s home into the city.

When it eventually reaches the northern bank of the river it leads to a meeting between the separated zones although not quite in the manner the architect intended. The two halves of the city are symbolic, of course, and the mind/body, rational/irrational divide is mirrored in the reltionship between Robick and his brothel madame neighbour, Sophie. The use of a fantastic device to explore issues of character or morality is a common one in written fiction but less so in comic stories where fantasy or sf elements are often nothing more than eye candy. Schuiten and Peeters’ fictions are closer to those of Borges (whose Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is cited as an influence) and Calvino than the tradition of fantastic adventure stories.

The burgeoning growth of the Network is one of the more fascinating creations from Schuiten and Peeters, and its presence recurs from time-to-time in the Obscure World. If there can be one Network, there may be others, and one of these manifests in the middle of Brasilia in an epilogue to the original story drawn some years later. An older Robick has found his way to the Brazilian capital and the appearance there of the Network seems to imply a connection with the architect.

L’archiviste.

The mysterious growth is also seen in another book, L’archiviste (1987), a beautiful collection of large plates showing different views of the Obscure World. Schuiten here manages to work a variation on Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead; regular {feuilleton} readers will perhaps appreciate why I like this work as much as I do.

A further appearance is in another single piece which Tuxedomoon member Peter Principle used on the cover of his 1985 album Sedimental Journey. That album appeared on the Crammed Discs label which fittingly is based in Brussels. The encyclopedic Obskür site lists other notable sightings:

We know that part of the structure rose from the wave during the great equinoctial tide not far from the SODROVNI Cape, and it was also seen in ROTH and at the GREEN LAKE, as well as in the SEPTENTRIONAL and POZNAH Jungles, not to mention CHULA VISTA, the IVALO volcanic chain and the MARAHUACA Plateau.

I’ll end this by wondering whether MC Escher’s Cubic Space Division (1952) was an influence on this story. Escher had architectural interests of his own, of course, and his inventions have been borrowed by a variety of artists for many years. This is one of his more abstract works yet it sparks the imagination by seeming to be an illustration of something. Schuiten avoids Escher’s paradoxes but we’ve seen enough influences from elsewhere to make it a possibility.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega Cemetery
• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

The Obscure World.

Les Murailles de Samaris (1983) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the first of the stories which explores the world of Les Cités Obscures, a “counter-Earth” on the opposite side of our Sun with a continent of separate city-states, each with their own distinct architectural style. Having discovered these stories first in their French editions it wasn’t immediately apparent how much the Obscure World was supposed to be connected to our own; a number of the books contain references to people or places in our world and the city of Brüsel, subject of the book of that name, is a kind of parallel Brussels. The counter-Earth explanation isn’t given in the early books but seems to have evolved later, as does Schuiten and Peeters’ introduction of portals between the worlds which imply a two-way leakage of influence. Writer and artist encourage fans of the series to suggest or “discover” new portals to the Obscure World.

A view over Xhystos.

The distant city of Samaris is the mysterious destination of Les Murailles de Samaris (The Walls of Samaris), a story which begins in the city of Xhystos whose style is fully Art Nouveau in a manner reminiscent of the celebrated Belgian architect Victor Horta, if Horta had been allowed to design a city where every building is decorated with wrought-iron curves and glass-canopied roofs, and where trams go by on elevated roads several storeys high. The narrator, Franz, is informed by the city authorities that he’s been chosen to go on a perilous mission to discover whether rumours about the nature of Samaris are true or not. Previous explorers have failed to return so Franz’s friends and girlfriend regard his acceptance of the mission as suicidal. What follows is a journey outside by steam train into a surrounding zone of lawless ruins, then a journey by “altiplane” and “aerophele”, the latter being a kind of multi-winged sand yacht.

Approaching Samaris.

The journey through jungle and desert regions then the first encounter with the city is the highlight of this story. Samaris proves to be a place of narrow streets with a monumental late-Victorian appearance similar to the quasi-historical style favoured by exposition architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Franz wonders why the people of Samaris are so unresponsive and why the buildings seem to change location or reveal new parts of themselves. Unfortunately the story—which ends rather too quickly—is subject to the famous Borges dictum that “the solution to the mystery is always inferior to the mystery itself”, and it’s this that makes Les Murailles de Samaris one of the weaker parts of Les Cités Obscures. There isn’t much more I can tell you without spoiling the thing altogether. But this is an early work; later stories make up for any disappointment. More tomorrow.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).

Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas, I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours of Garas and others. Schuiten’s parents were both architects which perhaps explains his predilection; in addition to a large body of comics work, he’s produced designs for film—notably Taxandria by Raoul Servais—Belgian stamps, and a steampunk look for the Arts et Métiers station of the Paris Métro. In 1994 he created cover designs and a series of illustrations for the publication of Jules Verne’s rediscovered manuscript, Paris au XXieme Siecle.

Cover for Spirou (2000).

I first encountered Schuiten’s work in a 1980 issue of Heavy Metal magazine which was reprinting translated stories from the French Metal Hurlant along with original work. Schuiten’s story, The Cutter of the Fog, was an erotic and futuristic tale of a small community and the obsession of the local “fog-cutter”. François’s brother Luc wrote the piece and it bears some similarity with JG Ballard’s Vermilion Sands story, The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D. Unusually for Schuiten, the architecture was downplayed in this one although the small homes with their geodesic roofs are like extrapolations of architectural plans from one of the Whole Earth Catalogues.

The next time I saw his work was several years later when artist Bryan Talbot showed me some of the comic albums he’d brought back from a European convention. Among these there were several of the Cités Obscures albums that Schuiten had been creating during the Eighties and Nineties with writer Benoît Peeters. These knocked me out with their apparently effortless creation of an imaginary world comprised of several city states, each with their own unique architectural style, and a wealth of retro-future technology, from dirigibles of all shapes and sizes to ornithopters and huge motorised unicycles. One of the many things I liked about European comic artists, and something which made me favour their work over their American counterparts, was the creation of richly detailed imaginary universes with inhabitants one could expect to meet in our world, not facile superheroes or vigilantes. Schuiten went further than his contemporaries by making the architecture meticulously believable and foregrounding its design to an extent that in some of the Cités Obscures stories architecture itself is the subject.

This revelation was both delightful and frustrating, the latter since the stories were all in French and it was a while before Dark Horse and others began publishing English translations. The lack of easily available English editions of Schuiten’s work is one reason why he isn’t better known—unlike Moebius, for example—and it’s difficult to say why translation took so long when his imagination and draughtsmanship is unimpeachable. My theory is that for many years the American companies who might have translated and reprinted his work would have looked askance at the overt eroticism which is a continual feature of his stories. Nudity, both male and female, and sexual encounters, are a commonplace in his work, as they are in numerous European albums. Sex in Schuiten’s stories often works as a counterpoint to the cold obsessions of his architects and archivists, especially in the Cités Obscures story, Fever in Urbicand, where the madame of a brothel tries to lure the city’s chief architect away from his designs. It was only in 2004 that DC Comics published The Hollow Grounds, a translated collection of some early strips which included The Cutter of the Fog.

Cités Cinés.

It’s difficult to fully convey the scope of these stories if you haven’t seen the albums yourself. Schuiten is well-known in the comics world—at least to those who look away from America—but I’ve never seen any mention of his name among enthusiasts of fantasy fiction. Fantasy writers and critics frequently refer to films such as The City of Lost Children (1995) for its invention and steampunk atmosphere; you get all of that and several worlds more in Schuiten’s work. It’s my contention that Les Cités Obscures in particular is a significant work of contemporary fantasy deserving of wider attention, not merely a collection of albums and related books. In order to elaborate on this further I’m devoting the coming week to some of the key Cités Obscures stories. For those whose curiosity has been piqued, there’s a sprawling website, mostly in French and with some broken links, but you can at least see more of his wonderful drawings. Also of note is Obskür, in English and probably a better starting place for those new to Schuiten’s world.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Temples for Future Religions by François Garas
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

Continuing an occasional series.

A recent post at A Journey Round My Skull is a stylish series of Indian book jackets from 1964 to 1984. These impress partly for the way they rework western design approaches, and they consequently look very different from the florid visuals one might (lazily) expect of Indian cover design. Western culture borrowed more than enough from India in the 1960s, from clothes to music, so it only seems right that the sub-continent should be free to take something back.

Luna Toon by Victor Moscoso (1968).

Will at A Journey Round My Skull mentions the above cover design as reminding him of this Krautrock bible, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, a book which happens to be my favourite repository of musical geek-dom. The cover reminded me more of the weirdly abstract comic strips created by artist and graphic designer Victor Moscoso for the early run of Zap Comix in the late Sixties. Moscoso was one of the most graphically revolutionary of the West Coast poster artists, and his approach to comics looks surprisingly fresh today next to the work of fellow artists like Robert Crumb. Those limitless vistas go back to Giorgio de Chirico but it was Salvador Dalí who made deserts raked by evening shadows reflect interior landscapes of his own, and it was Dalí’s immense popularity that in turn popularised that endless plane as a stage for surreal events. Moscoso borrows from the Surrealists and comic artists like George Herriman as much as he borrows from Disney; in his posters he was one of many artists taking motifs or whole designs from Art Nouveau. Our Indian egg may well be an original work but the first example in Will’s post is a very Saul Bass-like hand, so I’m guessing that the designers of these books were looking around for inspiration. And that eye-in-a-hand? Moscoso had done that as well.

Blues Project Poster by Victor Moscoso (1967).

While we’re discussing Victor Moscoso, it’s convenient to draw attention to a slight mystery connecting his poster art and the great album cover designer, Barney Bubbles. The poster above was one of a number that Moscoso made incorporating Victorian or Edwardian photographs, and two at least of these use antique erotica as their central image.

Space Ritual interior, design by Barney Bubbles (1973).

This particular photo always stands out for me. The woman is familiar to anyone who’s seen the interior of the fold-out sleeve Barney Bubbles created for Hawkwind’s Space Ritual album in 1973. Barney spent some time in San Francisco in the late Sixties and was undoubtedly familiar with Moscoso’s work, as he was with all the great designs coming from the West Coast at that time. What surprises me is that he should have somehow found the same image to use as Moscoso did. Was there a popular book of Edwardian erotica which everyone was familiar with? Did he ask Moscoso where he’d found the photo? Did he find it by chance? Barney Bubbles experts don’t know the answer (I’ve asked) and the question is in any case a rather trivial one. But I’m still curious… As early porn photos go it’s a particularly fine one and I’d like to know whether there are more like it and where it came from. Needless to say, if anyone knows more about this, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #9: Mondrian fashions
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

The Fountain of Youth.

Another artist I ought to have mentioned earlier. Benoit Prévot is a French illustrator and comic artist with a sideline in stylish homoerotics. He’s witty too, wit being a rare quality in art of this nature, as is the Twenties’ atmosphere he so obviously enjoys. His official site has originals for sale.

Wine-Fuelled Imaginings.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Phallic worship
• The art of ejaculation

It’s inevitable when writing about gay art and artists that Oliver Frey’s name will turn up eventually, so here’s the requisite posting. Frey is often better known in gay circles under the nom de plume he used in the 1980s, “Zack”, when he was a very prolific illustrator and comic artist for Britain’s small number of gay mags. As Oliver Frey he was already well-known as an accomplished professional illustrator who was for a time an artist for Look and Learn’s long-running science fiction adventure strip The Trigan Empire. That professional work makes him probably the most widely-seen of all gay porn artists simply because he drew some Superman pages which are briefly seen at the beginning of the 1978 Superman.

His career as a comic artist honed his skill at dealing with figures and telling a story which is one of the reasons his gay strips are still highly valued today. Those strips tend to be completely pornographic right from the start so I’ll spare the delicate sensibilities of some of the readers here and link you to some collections of his Zack work instead. In the meantime, I’d love to know where the picture of the boy with the sword (above) comes from originally. It’s a lot more finished than his Zack drawings and is paired on this page with a similar picture of serpent-twined tribal youths which hints at some kind of Burroughs-esque Wild Boys scenario. If anyone knows the answer, please leave a comment. As it is, it makes a good addition to the Men with swords archive, as does the piece of fluff below.

Oliver Frey links:
• Arrumako’s Gay Blog | A substantial collection of complete strips and sundry illustrations.
• Daddy’s Here | More single illustrations and some magazine scans including an interview with the artist.
• Gay Erotic Art Links | Another page with further links elsewhere.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The men with swords archive

The entire run of Britain’s first underground/alternative newspaper. Incredible. IT was never as flashy as Oz but ran for longer and arguably had the better contributors, among them William Burroughs. One notable feature was an avant garde comic strip, The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, written by Michael Moorcock and M John Harrison with artwork by Mal Dean and Richard Glyn Jones. Heavyweight contributions to magazines tend to get reprinted, however, what I enjoy seeing in archives such as this is the ephemera which can’t be found elsewhere: adverts, reviews and illustrations like the one below. The site is a bit slow and it would have been good to have individual issues as PDFs but it feels churlish to complain. More archives like this, please.

Via Jahsonic.

Illustration by Stanley Mouse (1969).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Realist
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

By the time Yellow Submarine appeared on TV in the early Seventies I was already a keen viewer of anything showing the groovier side of the late Sixties. What I recall of that decade is resolutely unspectacular—I was only 7 in 1969, after all—but Swinging London as seen in the lighter films of the period, or via trace elements in TV series such as The Avengers, always looked like a fun place to be. Yellow Submarine was a concentrated dose of all the gaudiest elements of the era and immediately became one of my favourite films, probably the favourite psychedelic film until I finally got to see Performance in 1983.

This comic strip adaptation of the film is a curious cash-in from 1968 which is nonetheless better, and longer, than I expected. The writer and artist go uncredited but whoever they were they manage to flesh out the admittedly sketchy storyline and still retain the atmosphere of the film. One significant change may be the result of the timidity of the time with John Lennon’s lysergic muse, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds being downgraded to Paul McCartney’s rather more mundane Rita the Meter Maid.

The comic came with this poster and the whole package is now highly-sought by Beatles fans with near mint copies going for $300. Naturally there are various copies circulating in the digital world and I shouldn’t have to tell you how to find them.

There were plans by Dark Horse in the 1990s to produce a more faithful adaptation of the film in comic form. Bill Morrison was the artist and this would have tied-in with the film’s release on DVD in 1999. He managed 26 pages before Apple Records pulled the plug on the project which seems a shame going by the completed work. The Beatles’ back catalogue is due to be reissued soon in CD editions which will replace the shoddy 1987 versions. Expect to hear more about Yellow Submarine before the year is out.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sonic Assassins
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all
• Heinz Edelmann
• Please Mr. Postman
• All you need is…

I drew attention yesterday to the abraded look of the Taking Woodstock poster and mentioned a recent book design of mine which used a similar effect. This is that cover, created for a collection of Joe R. Lansdale’s horror novels coming soon from Underland Press. Lansdale is known mainly for being the writer of the story which Don Coscarelli adapted for Bubba Ho-tep in 2002 (a great film, incidentally) but he’s done a lot more besides. Find out more at his website.

While on the subject of self-promotion, the invent-your-own-band website Figment posted an interview with me as a complement to their cover art competition which I’ve been judging. Results of that will be announced at the end of the week.

And speaking of interviews, I’ll mention again Jay Babcock’s exclusive interview/feature with comic artist Rick Veitch over at Arthur. Rick’s an artist I’ve always had a lot of time for and this piece includes a special intro/appreciation by collaborator Alan Moore. The interview examines the serious business of dreaming, with Rick’s advice on using your dreams for artistic breakthroughs, personal growth, problem solving, and time/space travel.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sleeve craft
• Finch

Continuing an occasional series.

The poster at the top left is the unused Ministry of Information design created to maintain Britain’s resolve after war had been declared in September 1939. This simple slogan struck a chord recently among Britons sick of the climate of fear, security theatre and authoritarian coercion which, deliberately or not, appears to benefit politicians and the agents of the State more than the populace who pay their wages. The BBC asked whether this was the greatest motivational poster ever. The Guardian noted the popularity of the slogan and its inevitable commercial exploitation:

…one day in 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sifting through a box of hardbacks he had bought at auction when he saw “A big piece of paper folded up at the bottom. I opened it out, and I thought, wow. That’s quite something. I showed it to Mary, and she agreed. So we framed it and put it up on the bookshop wall. And that’s where it all started.”

The reworked version at the top right is one of the opening pages from The Black Dossier (2007) by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. The crown is replaced by a portcullis and Gill Sans is dropped in favour of Edward Johnston’s sans serif typeface which has been used throughout the London Underground system since the 1930s.

The original poster has been undergoing numerous redesigns, from the jokey to the serious. The green design is one of the better variants by designer Matt Jones.

The blue design is part of an advertising campaign by the British Home Office intended to promote their new “Policing Pledge”, “a set of promises to local residents that not only gives more information about who their local neighbourhood policing team is, but also ensures that communities will have a stronger voice in telling the police what they think is most important and what they are most worried about.”

Laudable as this intention may be, I was very surprised when I saw this poster on a bus shelter earlier in the week. While the Home Office and its advertising people are fully entitled to reclaim a design which originated with the State in the first place, one of the reasons the original poster strikes a chord is because it runs counter to anti-terrorist nonsense like this. It speaks, among other things, to people sick of being lied to by politicians and spied on by police and security services. To see a forgotten design experience a swelling of grassroots popularity then be co-opted by the State itself is as depressing as it would have been had Richard Nixon used psychedelic posters to campaign for his re-election. To see a campaign use slogans which treat the rights of defendants as flippantly as the poster remixers when this present government has spent the past ten years undermining the rights of its citizens is simply a disgrace.

Update: A Flickr pool catalogues the variations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

Coincidence abounds: on Wednesday I was following a few referral URLs to see who’d been linking here and was led to a Lexic.us page about hermaphrodites which in turn had me looking again at the wonderful Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre. Thursday’s postal delivery brought issue 1 of The Gnostic which prominently features the Louvre sculpture on its cover. Inside there’s my portrait of William Burroughs illustrating a piece about Burroughs’s Gnostic identification by Sven Davisson. (I linked to another essay on the same theme in 2007.) The Gnostic is an excellent publication which, the Alan Moore interview aside, I’ve only skimmed through so far. Alan’s piece is very enlightening since the discussion stays fixed around religion, science and the occult and includes the most thorough extrapolation I’ve seen to date of his long work in progress, Jerusalem. There’s also a transcript of part of his William Blake piece from 2001, Angel Passage. If you want to know more I suggest you order a copy ($12 / £8 / €9) from Bardic Press.

Coincidence further abounds as this arrived just as Pádraig Ó Méalóid publicly announced his discovery of the long-lost and unpublished third issue of Alan Moore’s Big Numbers. This was Alan’s self-published “real life” comic series from 1989 which got off to a great start then fatally collapsed when artist Bill Sienkiewicz, then his replacement, Al Columbia, both dropped out of the project. It’s one of the great lost projects of contemporary comics and seeing the third issue sustaining the quality of the first two is deeply frustrating.

The last piece of Moore news concerns The Mindscape of Alan Moore once again which is now available to buy through iTunes. $9.99 will only get you the feature-length documentary, however. If you buy the double-disc DVD you also get my groovy interface design and an extra disc of interviews with major comic artists.

Update: Alan Moore has certainly ruled the week in this household with the delivery on Friday of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, a new edition of George Khoury’s book-length autobiographical interview with Alan, and an essential purchase for anyone with more than a cursory interest in Alan’s life and work. The book features copious artwork examples by many Moore collaborators including my CD designs and the cover for the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs: Gnostic visionary

Rorschach from The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

The hype over the Watchmen film reached critical mass this week and as a consequence there’s been a spike of interest in the two Alan Moore interviews I posted in 2006, with Empire magazine and other movie sites linking here. I won’t bore you with my lack of interest in the film—read the book, it’s a masterpiece—but it’s worth noting that the feature-length DeZ Vylenz documentary, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, dramatised scenes from V for Vendetta and Watchmen back in 2003, long before Hollywood put either of them on screen. The Rorschach scene is especially interesting for having the opening monologue from Watchmen voiced by Alan himself. I’d never thought of Rorschach having such a gravel-throated delivery until I heard this. If Zack Snyder’s version is the same then you know where they swiped it from.

V’s dressing-room from The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, The Mindscape of Alan Moore is available on DVD in Europe and the US and includes a bonus disc of interviews with Alan’s collaborators, Dave Gibbons among them. All the packaging and interface was designed by yours truly.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Mindscape of Alan Moore: US edition
• The Demon Regent Asmodeus
• New things for June
• Alan Moore in Arthur magazine
• Watchmen
• Alan Moore interview, 1988

Continuing from yesterday’s post, these nameless characters were sketches for a proposed comic strip that writer Jamie Delano and I were planning in the mid-Nineties. We had a feeling that the long-neglected pirate genre was due for a revival and talked about a revisionist take on buccaneering which would dispense with the Robert Newton antics and steer closer to the brutal reality. Among the touchstones there was On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, the anarchist pirate community in Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs and the ferocious scalp-hunters in Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. There was also talk of throwing some voodoo into the mix, hence the veve tattoos. It wasn’t to be, of course. Little of my work has ever resembled mainstream comics fare and Jamie’s publishers, DC Comics, had already been underwhelmed by the detailed style I was using in the Lovecraft and Lord Horror comics. When I tried presenting them with some trial pages in a more open style I was told that they’d been expecting to see more of my detailed line work…

We had a couple of other characters planned, including a tattooed islander inspired by Queequeg from Moby Dick, but the samples here are the best of the sketches. The shark- or whale-jaw false leg was my own invention and something I’m fairly sure I’ve not seen before. I’ve no idea whether such a thing is workable but it was a nice touch.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buccaneers #1
• Howard Pyle’s pirates
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones

Some work news. I finished this CD design last year but, as is often the case with these things, it’s taken a while to make its way into the world. This was the final piece of the Mindscape of Alan Moore project and it’s probably the last thing I’ll do which makes use of the famous Sigillum Dei Aemeth of Doctor John Dee (1527–1608), wax versions of which can be seen in the British Museum. Alan Moore is a great Dee aficionado and since the sigil appears in the DeZ Vylenz documentary it made sense to use it for the DVD package and interface. This led in turn to a new poster design for the film (below) and—eventually—the soundtrack CD. The latter should be shipping shortly from Shadowsnake Films.

Lastly, and also design-related, the New York Times this week had a short piece about designer Barney Bubbles based around Paul Gorman’s Reasons to be Cheerful book. My quote about Barney’s Hawkwind work being “cosmic Art Nouveau” was borrowed from the book’s text and the piece features one of those slideshow selections the NYT does so well. Once again it’s great to see how Paul’s book is stimulating new interest and appraisal of work which was neglected for far too long.

DVD menu.

Poster design.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Mindscape of Alan Moore: US edition
• New things for August
• The Demon Regent Asmodeus
• New things for June