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08-30-16 from the Everydays series by Beeple. • “Monsieur de Bougrelon is a unique character: loquacious, proud, a leftover from an earlier age, wearing garish outfits and makeup that drips. To his speechless audience, he waxes nostalgic about his life as an exile in Holland, as well as what he calls “imaginary pleasures” – obsessions […]

Untitled painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska. The artist is profiled by S. Elizabeth at Dirge Magazine. • “…from my point of view, the only thing to do with any genre, any medium, is pretty much to break it, to transcend it, to find out what its limits are, and then go beyond them, and see what […]

Parkland (2012) by Dean Monogenis. • “The Story Behind the Planet’s Most Influential Road Map of ‘Weird Music’“. Gustavo Turner investigates the enduring influence of The Nurse With Wound List. Related: A Discogs list of links to all the NWWL discographies, and a recommended listening guide by Ultima Thule. • Tokyo Melody: Un film sur […]

From What is a Witch, “an illuminated manifesto on witchcraft” by Pam Grossman and Tin Can Forest. • “The other strand of influence for me from dance music was a production house called Savoy in Manchester, England. They were a super underground publishing house that printed cartoons and comic books, and they also released a […]

Not the horror magazine, this is an earlier American title that ran from 1919 to 1923. Shadowland covered the arts in general with a preference for stage and film. The thing that immediately sets it apart from other film magazines of the period is the cover art by AM Hopfmuller; many of the paintings resemble theatre […]

Femme avec des fleurs (1912) by Romaine Brooks. • This week’s anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo murders was noted by some of those who defended the magazine last year. “I don’t write about Charlie Hebdo in France,” said Robert McLiam Wilson, “they have plenty of people who can do that. But I’ll do almost anything […]

Oz 4. Cover art by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. From a television series out of time to a magazine very much of its time. The Prisoner and Oz magazine are exact contemporaries: issue 4 of Oz (June 1967) would have been on sale when Patrick McGoohan and co. were busy turning Portmeirion into The Village. […]

This is the third time this drawing has appeared here but the first time I’ve been able to fully credit the artist. Walpurgisnacht appeared in issue 604 (April 26, 1917) of Austrian humour magazine Die Muskete. Dier was Austrian, and contributed to many issues of Die Muskete around this time, always credited as “Amadeus” hence […]

A copy of the cover art that I attempted to colour-correct some years ago to compensate for the poor print reproduction. This month I’m in Record Collector magazine talking in a sidebar feature about my work on the Hawkwind album The Chronicle of the Black Sword. The issue is Hawkwind-heavy, with a Nik Turner interview, […]

The Swing by Alan Odle. The University of Heidelberg has for some time now had several years of British art magazine The Studio in its archive but I’ve yet to delve fully into the later issues. These illustrations are from two articles from the volumes covering the year 1925, both of which feature the exceptional […]

The Arthur table. Free mags! Arthurfest is an as-yet unreleased feature-length documentary by Lance Bangs which captured the two-day music festival of that name in Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles. The festival took place ten years ago to the day, and was the first such event organised by the sorely missed Arthur magazine. I was […]

I’ve been working all day to get multiple things finished before leaving for Providence so here’s a handful of Druillet covers pulled from Noosfere. Philippe Druillet must be one of the first artists—possibly the first—whose work is Lovecraftian at core. Artists had been illustrating Lovecraft’s stories since their first publication but Druillet’s work from the […]

The Disciples of Cthulhu (1976). A disagreement I have with the burgeoning world of Lovecraft art is the relentless focus on monsters—and I say this in a week when I’ve been working on a new commission of exactly this: six pictures of Lovecraftian creatures. Lovecraft famously emphasised atmosphere as the paramount ingredient in a weird […]

It’s a short step from Escher’s perceptual games to optical illusions in general. Blivets are one of those curious cultural artefacts that appear everywhere but whose origin is a mystery. Even the name blivet isn’t settled (or, for that matter, the meaning of the word) since the impossible figure is also known as The Devil’s […]

Cover art by Leo Morey. To HP Lovecraft, Pluto was the planet Yuggoth, home to the fungoid, brain-harvesting Mi-go whose exploits are detailed in The Whisperer in Darkness (1931). Clark Ashton Smith wasn’t averse to imagining the planets of the Solar System as exotic worlds but in his short story The Plutonian Drug, published in […]

Spine and cover art by John Schoenherr for the first American edition of Dune, 1965. • “[Herbert] had also taken peyote and read Jung. In 1960, a sailing buddy introduced him to the Zen thinker Alan Watts, who was living on a houseboat in Sausalito. Long conversations with Watts, the main conduit by which Zen […]

“On to the brocken the witches are flocking.” From Faust (1925) by Harry Clarke. Spotted earlier this week, a rather blatant swipe from Harry Clarke’s Faust by an unknown cover artist for the Avon Fantasy Reader. Such borrowings weren’t uncommon in the pulp magazines—the pressure of deadlines no doubt encouraged them—and I’ve logged a couple […]

TV Wipeout, as detailed in an earlier post, was a one-off “video magazine” compiled and released on VHS by Cabaret Voltaire in 1984. This was the fourth title on the Cab’s own Doublevision label which was easily the best of the UK’s independent video labels at the time. Many of the other Doublevision releases have […]

Late last year, US design magazine Communication Arts asked me to write a piece about psychedelic art, past and present. The resulting feature has been out for a couple of weeks in the May/June issue (no. 56) but I hadn’t seen it in print until a copy turned up today. Attempting to wrangle discussion of […]

One of the posts last December concerned a short TV film by Alan Garner, To Kill a King, the final entry in the Leap in the Dark series which the BBC ran from 1973 to 1980. Each half-hour episode concerned the supernatural, presented in either drama or documentary form, which for me would have meant […]