One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint of The Call of Cthulhu from Barnes & Noble.

While we’re on the subject—and book covers are never far away, as yesterday’s post demonstrates—I was asked to contribute to this week’s Mind Meld discussion at SF Signal, answering the question “Which are the most memorable book covers in science fiction and fantasy?” Some of the entries in my list have been discussed here in the past. Compared to the other responses I come across like I’m giving a lecture… And there was further sf cover discussion at io9 this week. Good to see older generations of artists and designers still receiving enthusiastic attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Science fiction and fantasy covers

I’d only seen one or two of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before but you can see the complete (?) set here. These date from 1969 when Dalí was well past his prime as an artist but they’re still worth a look to see how he tackled each chapter, using the skipping girl motif from earlier paintings as his Alice figure. The attraction of the Alice books for the Surrealists is no surprise; Max Ernst produced a rather enigmatic series of Alice-themed lithographs while André Breton had earlier made Alice the “Siren of Stars” in the set of Surrealist playing cards he designed in the 1940 (below). I’d imagine there are other connections I’ve missed; leave a comment if you know of any. (Thanks to Charity for the tip!)

For more Dalí, here’s something I neglected to link to a while ago, the legendary Dalí meets Disney short, Destino.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• Dalí and Film
• The Illustrators of Alice
• Surrealist cartomancy

I won’t say this is by popular demand but after persistent requests for posters of my cover art for Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel, Finch, I’ve opened a new CafePress shop selling exactly that. The largest of these is 58.38cm x 82.55 (22.984″ x 32.5″) which should be big enough for most appetites. There’s also a smaller size 35.03cm x 49.53 (13.7904″ x 19.5″) and I’ve added some cards and postcards.

In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

Jeff is currently promoting Finch on his latest book tour, details of which can be found here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch

No, I didn’t go searching for this, I had my fill of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last month. The British Library website is a lot more amenable than it used to be for the casual browser, and one of its newer sections is a small collection of what they call virtual books which enable you to leaf through some of their exclusive volumes. The pages above are from the original handwritten manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, from which the printed book was later adapted. I have this in a small facsimile edition so I don’t need a web version, and the illustrations are often reprinted, but this web copy allows you to see the work in its entirety. They also reproduce the text and have an audio facility. I went through my copy a couple of times whilst working on the calendar in order to see how Dodgson depicted some of his scenes. A few of his conceptions differ from the famous Tenniel illustrations, not least his drawing of Alice herself who closely resembles the real Alice Liddell.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Bookplate by Denis Kostromitin.

Following the recent postings of covers and illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, Will at A Journey Round My Skull posts the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest which encouraged illustrators to create an Orchideengarten-styled bookplate design. You can see the winner and many other splendid entries on his pages. I fully intended to do something for this then got sidetracked by work on the Alice in Wonderland calendar but I’ve picked out a couple of the (inevitably) black-and-white pieces which I thought stood out. The death’s-head moth on @ndy paciorek’s picture below makes a convenient link with yesterday’s post.

Meanwhile, there’s further Orchideengarten goodness over at Arthur Magazine.

Bookplate by @ndy paciorek.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Der Orchideengarten illustrated
• David Becket’s bookplates
• Der Orchideengarten

Halloween approaches and as a precursor it’s a great pleasure to be able to post a selection of interior illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, courtesy of Will at A Journey Round My Skull. Der Orchideengarten was a German magazine of weird fiction which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921 and whose existence today is rarely acknowledged despite being credited as the world’s first fantasy magazine. Information is scarce and these scans come from Will’s own copies which is why I’ve posted fifteen more below the fold; you can’t see this stuff anywhere else. A Journey Round My Skull featured some covers and a different set of interior illustrations earlier this year, and there should be a new post complementing this one with more of the magazine’s stunning cover designs.

What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years. Some are almost Expressionist in style, while the Wild Hunt series below shows a distinct Goya influence. I’d love to know how the written content matches the illustrations; I suspect there’s the same difference of atmosphere and emphasis to American weird fiction as there is in the drawings.

Update: Will’s new post is Watering the Toxic Garden which will be followed on Thursday by the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest.

Click on any of these pictures for a larger version.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Der Orchideengarten
• The Great God Pan
• Jugend Magazine
• Meggendorfer’s Blatter
• Simplicissimus

It’s taken me years but the recent obsession with UK psychedelia led me to finally watch Joe Massot’s piece of cinematic fluff from 1968, Wonderwall, a film distinguished primarily for its score by George Harrison (with Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton playing pseudonymously), and its title which was swiped years later by a bunch of Rutles-imitators from Manchester. The story is so slight it would have barely sustained an hour-long TV film: absent-minded scientist (Jack MacGowran) becomes intrigued by his glamorous neighbour (Jane Birkin playing “Penny Lane”; yeah, right…) and knocks holes in the walls of his flat in order to scrutinise her modelling, partying and frequent undressing. Unlike Blow Up (1966, and also featuring Jane Birkin) and the later Performance (1970), both of which attempted to accurately pin down some of the modish aspects of the period, this is a very kitsch piece. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was entertaining kitsch like, say, Smashing Time (1967), but Massott has to resort to scenes of limp comedy and some rather dull dream sequences in order to pad the thing out. Between the handful of actual dialogue scenes there’s a lot of gloating over Ms Birkin’s flesh which no doubt satisfied one half of the audience but by today’s standards is hardly thrilling. Iain Quarrier plays Penny’s duplicitous boyfriend (with a fake Liverpool accent) in his last screen role before he quit acting. Quarrier and MacGowran had appeared together in two of Roman Polanski’s British films, Cul-de-sac (1966) and Dance of the Vampires (1967). In the latter, MacGowran again plays an absent-minded scientist while Quarrier is cinema’s first (?) gay vampire.

An interjection from The Fool.

Of chief interest for me in Wonderwall was the decor and title card decorations by Dutch psychedelic collective, The Fool (who appear in the party scene), famous for their earlier Beatles associations including the inner sleeve for Sgt Pepper and designs for the short-lived Apple Boutique in London’s Baker Street. I was also curious about the distinctive decor of MacGowran’s flat which contrasts with the psychedelia next door, all dark green walls embellished with Victorian murals and a Tennyson poem—very fittingly a piece called The Daydream—which circles the room.

The professor prepares to attack the wall.

This was particularly interesting in that it made another connection between the psychedelic era and Victorian arts movements, especially from the Aesthetic/Arts & Crafts end of things, but it wasn’t at all obvious whether the connection was an intentional part of the film’s production design or an accident of location and budgetary convenience. Aside from the old-fashioned appearance of MacGowran’s rooms there seemed no reason why his otherwise cultureless character would have any interest in decorating his living space in this way.

The street corner then…

…and now.

The building itself is equally distinctive and an exterior shot conveniently shows a street sign placing the location in Lansdowne House, a Victorian apartment block on the corner of Lansdowne Road and Ladbroke Road in the Notting Hill/Holland Park area of London.

Lansdowne House.

What did the building look like today, I wondered? Google Earth proves indispensable at times like this and it was easy to find, in a street which looks more cramped than it does in the film. The presence of a blue plaque on the wall proved intriguing, a sign that the place once had famous residents. Googling for that revealed this photo which was a real surprise: Lansdowne House at one time contained studios for artists who included Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a gay couple and leading lights of London’s fin de siècle art scene (also friends of Oscar Wilde), and another artist, James Pryde, who with William Nicholson worked as The Beggarstaffs. So my suspicion about the Arts & Crafts decor was correct, which means that MacGowran’s flat may have been decorated that way originally and remained untouched since the 1890s. I haven’t seen Rhino’s special edition of Wonderwall which contained additional information about the making of the film, so have no idea whether the history of the building is mentioned there. If anyone does know, please leave a comment. For now I’m quite happy to have stumbled upon another minor link between two of my favourite art decades.

For more visuals, this page has a host of screen grabs from the film as well as some gif animations, all of which manage to make Wonderwall seem more interesting than it is when you’re watching it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander
• Images by Robert Altman

So I had a bright idea at the end of September… Instead of rehashing old work for a CafePress calendar design, I thought I’d try something new. I hadn’t done any artwork for myself all year, everything I’d been working on was a commission of some sort. In addition to that, I’d spent a large portion of the year delving deeper into the psychedelic music of the late Sixties, especially the wealth of obscure British bands to be found on the seemingly endless series of compilations which have trickled out over the past two decades. Everyone is familiar with Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit but, as I’ve noted before, themes from, and allusions to, the Alice books run through British psychedelia to an even greater degree. The Beatles put Lewis Carroll in their pantheon of influences on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, and Wonderland’s atmosphere of Victorian surrealism chimed perfectly with a resurgence of interest in Victorian art and design.

So at the end of September, mulling over ideas, I picked up one of my Lewis Carroll volumes and looked at the chapter list: 12 chapters…12 months…I could do a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland! The only drawback was being weighed down by ongoing work which meant that anything I did would have to be created quickly and easily. I reckoned it was manageable if I put a few rules in place first: try and rough out a chapter a day; make copious use of clip art decoration and scanned engravings; keep things bold and florid without worrying too much about fidelity to minor story points. In theory I could do the whole thing in about two weeks if I kept on schedule. As it turns out the whole thing took me three weeks as I got increasingly involved with illustrating the story. You can see the results below and larger copies of the pictures here. Two years ago I was saying I probably wouldn’t ever illustrate Lewis Carroll. That was true at the time since I couldn’t find an approach to the stories that would sustain my interest and (possibly) bring something new to the books. Seeing Alice’s adventures through the psychotropic prism of the late Sixties showed me the way into Wonderland. What’s needed now is to do the same next year for Looking-Glass Land. Watch this space.

The CafePress calendar page for would-be purchasers is here. Some notes on the pictures follow below.

Down the Rabbit Hole.

A great secondhand find recently was a 1970s reprint of the entire Harrod’s catalogue for 1895, over 1000 pages of engraved pictures which was a big help in quickly establishing mundane details such as bottles, watches, etc. Alice changes size and shape from month to month; since I was working at speed I had to live with that. The figures are from Victorian ads or Punch magazine illustrations. In order to keep them consistent I tinted the girls in each picture the same colour.

The typeface used throughout is a design from 1879 called Kismet. Not only does it appear in the Harrod’s catalogue, I’ve also seen it used on the covers of psychedelic compilations which made it the perfect choice for these pictures.

The Pool of Tears.

Things are still pretty bold at this point. Yes, there should only be one mouse but the symmetry worked better.

A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale.

I kept to the schedule for the first two pictures but this was the point where it started to get difficult. Tracking down all those animals took longer than intended and this became the pattern for many of the subsequent pictures. Roughing them out was easy but I’d then spend ages looking for one precise detail. Sometimes it really is quicker to just draw something…

The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill.

The house is made from parts of a Victorian architect’s catalogue set against a rather splendid paisley background.

Advice from a Caterpillar.

The mushrooms are Fly Agarics, of course, and it’s been pointed out to me that their arrangement is rather phallic; that wasn’t my intention but never underestimate the power of the subconscious. The paisley background I wanted to look like a Persian carpet. The hookah—which I amended with an extra bowl—was another detail from the Harrod’s catalogue.

Pig and Pepper.

The Cheshire Cat is Steinlen’s famous Chat Noir while the Duchess is the painting of La vecchia grotesqua by Quentin Massys upon which Tenniel is supposed to have based his drawing. I gave her a pair of “granny glasses”. Finally, the fractal background is made from one of Louis Wain’s psychedelic cat faces.

A Mad Tea-Party.

This is my favourite of all the pictures. I’d no idea what I was going to do for it until I set to work and it came together very easily. The Hatter is bursting out of a Victorian hat-maker’s contraption.

The Queen’s Croquet-Ground.

This one isn’t psychedelic at all but the playing cards—which are florid enough to begin with—looked best without any additional ornament.

The Mock Turtle’s Story.

Lots of aquatic decoration for the Mock Turtle’s undersea tales.

The Lobster Quadrille.

I decided against dancing lobsters; too time-consuming and even Tenniel only had one looking in a mirror. The peculiar roller-skates (skates…a pun, geddit?) are a genuine Victorian invention; the nautilus-headed woman isn’t.

Who Stole the Tarts?

Rather a chaotic scene, as fits the chapter, but I would have done more with this had there been time. The background is an engraving of the House of Commons but you’d never guess unless I’d mentioned it.

Alice’s Evidence.

Sharp shadows imply a return from dreamland. I’ve used those Art Nouveau butterfly shapes before and couldn’t resist slipping them in here. In the book the flying cards at the end turn into dead leaves which seems wrong for the month of May when the story is set; butterflies seem more suitable. For those who don’t want a calendar I’ll be putting these pictures together as a poster design at some point. Not just now, I’m feeling all psyched-out.

This series of pictures is dedicated to Michael English, of the great psychedelic design team Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, who died while work was in progress.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Michael English, 1941–2009
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937
• The Illustrators of Alice

I should have mentioned this a lot sooner considering the museum sent me a copy of the exhibition prospectus. Maison d’Ailleurs is the Museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and their current exhibition is Lines of Flight—Mervyn Peake, the Illustrated Work. Yverdon-les-Bains is too out of the way for most of us but the event gives me another excuse to draw attention to Peake’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll; some of the drawings from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark are among the works on display until February 14, 2010.

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) is celebrated today as the writer of the extraordinary series of novels about Titus Groan (often referred to as the Gormenghast books). Yet, during his lifetime he was more known for his graphic work.

From 1939 and for almost two decades, Peake produced illustrations both for his own work (Captain Slaughterboard; Rhymes without Reason) and for classics (Household Tales by the brothers Grimm; Alice in Wonderland; Treasure Island). His mastery of the pen and the pencil were unrivalled. Visually, his style could be disarmingly economical, using very pure and clean single lines to create a striking sense of volume. But with cross-hatching and dots Peake could also make his drawings look like engravings, providing the characters and objects he depicted, or the background to them, with rich and varied textures and a wide range of shades. (More.)

For more of Peake’s illustration work, see Mervynpeake.org.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs
• The Illustrators of Alice

As you might expect, Archive.org has a lot of Alice in Wonderland adaptations, including a silent film version whose poor picture quality makes any attempt to watch it a chore. Among the many books in their collection one of the best is this illustrated edition from 1907 by Charles Robinson, brother of the equally talented William Heath. The full-page illustrations are especially good for their swirling embellishments, and I like the way he establishes the playing card motifs very early on. But the PDF version of the book also shows his inventive page layouts with narrow vignettes cutting through the text and the margins featuring tiny figures running about. The colour plates aren’t so impressive but his black-and-white work makes up for that.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937
• The Illustrators of Alice

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

Le Bout du monde by Leonor Fini (1948).

Yes, I’ll definitely be going to see this one.

The first major exhibition of women artists and Surrealism to be held in Europe, Angels of Anarchy, opens this autumn at Manchester Art Gallery.

Featuring over 150 artworks by 32 women artists, the exhibition is a celebration of the crucial, but at the time not fully recognised, role that women artists have played within Surrealism. Paintings, prints, photographs, surreal objects and sculptures by well-known international artists including Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington and Lee Miller will be exhibited alongside works by artists less well-known in the UK, such as Emila Medková, Jane Graverol, Mimi Parent, Kay Sage and Francesca Woodman. Manchester Art Gallery is the only venue for this exhibition, making it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the works of so many significant women artists displayed together, with many of the works on loan from international public and private collections.

Angels of Anarchy runs from 26 September 2009–10 January 2010 at Manchester Art Gallery, and it’s a paying event with tickets at £6 (concessions £4, free entry for under 18s and Manchester Art Gallery Friends).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Leonor Fini, 1907–1996
• Surrealist women

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

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

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

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, vue en cours de construction (1897).

Another artist discovered whilst searching for something quite unrelated. The Musée d’Orsay are custodians of this drawing by François Garas (1866–1925), and they also have the most substantial appraisal of his career.

François Garas remains a mysterious architect, whose artistic pantheon included Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as John Ruskin, Richard Wagner, Jean Carriès and Edouard Manet. He obtained his diploma in 1894, and until 1914 regularly exhibited utopian architectural projects at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. His career started with the exhibition Architects’ Impressions in 1896 at the Le Barc de Bouteville gallery, alongside his fellow architects Henri Sauvage, Henry Provensal and Gabriel Guillemonat. This exhibition, accompanied by a rebellious booklet by the architect Frantz Jourdain, wanted to get rid of “the mental slavery produced by the exclusive study of Greek and Roman architecture, and by a knowledge of nothing but the Italian Renaissance”. This drawing featured in the exhibition; then it was seen again, the same year, in an exhibition by the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, as part of a collection entitled Artists’ Interiors.

From 1897, Garas exhibited increasingly oneiric projects at the Salon – “temples for future religions”, dedicated to Beethoven, Wagner, Life, Death and Thought. While his companions from the early days were designing social housing, Garas continued along the same fanciful path, then disappeared from the architectural scene without any of his projects ever having been built.

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, vue perspective depuis l’arrière du temple (1897).

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, visions du temple, clair de lune (1900).

The museum has several pages of various plans and sketches for these Temples for Future Religions, and also some quasi-Gothic designs for “Artist’s interiors” which would benefit from being seen at a larger size. Among his other works are a series of very diffuse pastel studies which look more like Claude Monet drawing the ruins of Angkor than architectural designs.

Un temple pour les religions futures (1901).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Evanescent City

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

Various members of the Outer Alliance are either posting fiction, or reviewing something or otherwise attempting to fill that declaration of intent. For my part I decided today to do a sketch based on my favourite chapter of The Ticket that Exploded by William Burroughs, the sequence entitled the black fruit which Burroughs wrote with Michael Portman. Ticket was the first Burroughs book I read at the age of 16 or so, having discovered a copy in a local library, and it really felt like something exploding in the head. For a start, the text is some of his least accommodating for an average reader, although I was already familiar enough with literary experiment to cope with that. Far more electrifying was seeing familiar scenarios from science fiction and fantasy infused with a raw and relentless gay sexuality of endless erections and spurting cocks. The black fruit begins with a science fiction scene of lost astronauts encountering alien fishboys intent on having sex; it then progresses through a series of descriptions which read like a pornographic rewriting of similar scenes from HP Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. In the opening pages of Ticket, Burroughs describes his book as “science fiction” but this was like no sf I’d read; I started to wish there was more like it. There are flashes of similar stuff in The Soft Machine (including an idea borrowed from Henry Kuttner) and elsewhere, and Cities of the Red Night is pretty much a full-on fantasy in its second half, but I’d still like to read more about the fishboys…

Fishboy and Astronaut (detail).

So here’s an explicitly erotic sketch based on the black fruit (click the picture for the full thing). This should have been a lot better but I’m out of practice drawing at the moment and I didn’t give myself enough time. The scene doesn’t really match the book either, and the astronaut figure is pretty crappy. Feeble excuses aside, Burroughs’ rotting swamp gardens with their marble statues of copulating boys deserve better. And where his fiction leads, I’m still hoping that more writers will follow, not by copying his obsessions but by being as fearless and honest in mining their own.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William S Burroughs: A Man Within
• The art of NoBeast

Moon Maiden (1910).

Goble’s Moon Maiden, an illustration from Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales, is proof that a peacock train needn’t be the sole preserve of masculine birds, but then Ruth St Denis had already shown us that. Art Passions has a decent selection of Goble’s fairy pictures although if you want to see the full complement of drawings made for these books you need to consult Archive.org. As usual with illustrators of this period, I find I prefer many of the black-and-white works over the paintings; Art Passions doesn’t have any of those, unfortunately, while the book scans are too low-res to do them justice. Once again, Bud Plant provides an overview of the artist’s career.

Sea-Nymphs – Ding-Dong, Bell (1920).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ruth St Denis

Yes, it’s been a busy year. These are books three and four respectively of the titles I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications, and there are more on the way.

Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand is a charming fantasy for children concerning the hotel of the title and its curious inhabitants, which include a ghost bellboy and a pirate captain. The illustrations were by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law and I tried to complement these with the lettering design and graphic elements. I always enjoy working on illustrated books.

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a very different beast, a big (480 pages) selection by Gordon Van Gelder of some of the many first-class stories from the sixty-year history of the fiction magazine. F&SF has published so many classic stories over the years the book could easily have been twice as big. As it is there are pieces by Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Philip K Dick, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, among others. The design in this case came from studying a copy of the magazine from 1967; I was already thinking of using Bodoni for the story titles and that choice was confirmed when I saw it used for the same purpose in the magazine. The calligraphic titles were also scanned from there, their design going back to the very first issue.

Both these books are on sale now, and Keith Brooke gave a glowing appraisal to the latter in The Guardian at the weekend.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Medicine Road by Charles De Lint
• The Best of Michael Moorcock

top left: David Pelham’s classic design (1972); top right: photography
by Lionel F Williams (Eye) and SOA / Photonica (Cogs) (1996).
bottom left and right: photography by Véronique Rolland (2000 & 2008).

In April this year I wrote about James Pardey’s excellent site devoted to book covers from the Penguin science fiction range. I’m often pointing to various book cover galleries on Flickr and elsewhere but James’s site goes far beyond these, with credits and annotations for every cover on display. He emailed this week to let me know that his site has been considerably expanded, from 160 covers to 250 (!), bringing the timeline closer to the present. In addition the site has improved page layouts which enable you to study the evolution of each title. All design sites should be this good.

And coincidentally, Anne S mentioned in the comments yesterday that she’s been adding some Penguin Classics covers to her Eye Candy for Bibliophiles site. Lots of other worthwhile viewing there, including some of the old Puffin covers for Alan Garner.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin science fiction
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Penguin Surrealism
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Penguin book covers
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

The Fishing Complex (2008).

Canadian artist David Trautimas re-purposes household and other objects into fantasy buildings by exaggerating their scale then montaging them into landscapes. This example is from his Habitat Machines series; there’s also an Industrial Parkland series. Many of the former group are pleasantly convincing, and their weathered appearance adds to the impression of having discovered the works of a lost Modernist architect. Some of these are like digital equivalents of paintings by Arnau Alemy.

Via Things Magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Arnau Alemany

Shared Worlds is a fantasy writing-oriented summer camp for teenagers created by Jeremy Jones and Jeff VanderMeer, and hosted at Wofford College, South Carolina. Jeff asked me to design a small booklet to be printed at the end of this year’s activities as a means of showcasing examples of the writings produced during the various events. He’s posted photos of the printed booklets, including pictures of the young authors autographing pages for each other, and should be writing more about Shared Worlds later.

Looking at Willy Pogàny’s work last week I was reminded that as well as illustrating books he worked in Hollywood for a while as an art director and set designer. Among those jobs was a credit for “Technical staff” on the only film for which director Harry Lachman is remembered today, a curious 1935 melodrama, Dante’s Inferno. This stars Spencer Tracy as a fairground barker whose talent for drawing an audience helps an old showman boost the attendance at his moralising “Dante’s Inferno” attraction.

Entrance to the fairground attraction.

A hubristic rise and fall follows for Tracy, and the film spends much of its running time in routine business and family scenes. What sets it apart is some striking fairground designs (no doubt Pogàny’s involvement) and a truly startling self-contained sequence when the old showman describes for Tracy the true nature of the Inferno. This sequence takes Gustave Doré’s celebrated illustrations and brings them to life in a series of atmospheric tableaux which even manage to contain brief glimpses of nudity. Hell, it seems, is the one place you can get away with not wearing any clothes. I’ve read many times that this sequence was borrowed from an earlier silent film, also called Dante’s Inferno, but have yet to come across any definite confirmation. It’s certainly possible since studios at that time treated other films in a very cavalier fashion; when a film was remade the studio would try to buy up and destroy prints of the earlier film. If anyone can point to more information about the origin of the Hell sequence, please leave a comment.

Stone tombs from the Inferno sequence.

If the Inferno sequence wasn’t already stolen in 1935, it works so well that it’s been plundered many times since; Kenneth Anger borrowed shots which he mixed into Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Derek Jarman did the same for TG: Psychick Rally in Heaven (1981), and Ken Russell slipped some tinted scenes into Altered States (1980). I tinted the entire sequence red and dumped it into the one-off video accompaniment I made for Alan Moore and Tim Perkins’ stage performance of Angel Passage in 2001; it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s been used elsewhere. As with many of Hollywood’s products, Lachman’s film pretends to condemn prurience—Tracy’s character exploits Hell’s lurid attractions for gain—while revelling in the opportunity to show as much bare flesh as the censors would allow. As with Doré, Lachman’s Inferno seems populated solely by men and women in the peak of physical fitness.

Inevitably, you can see the Inferno sequence on YouTube here and here. The film doesn’t seem to be available on DVD but it’s worth seeking out to watch in full. In addition to the infernal delights, you also get to see 16-year-old Rita Hayworth’s screen debut as a dancer on a cruise ship.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin
• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal
• Maps of the Inferno
• A TV Dante by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway
• The art of Lucio Bubacco
• The last circle of the Inferno
• Angels 4: Fallen angels