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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 [...]

Continuing from yesterday’s post, Bernie Wrightson appears in this 2003 documentary about the great fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. (And Frazetta is another artist who acknowledges a debt to Roy G Krenkel.) I saw this when it first appeared on video and it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in Frazetta’s work. Stephanie Bruder wrote this week [...]

Matthijs Kool, middeleeuws zwaardvechten.
Yes, the web breeds fetishes you weren’t even aware of once…. I blame Frank Frazetta for my interest in naked men with swords. This photo of Matthijs Kool is one of a series by Ewoud Broeksma who specialises in portraits of athletes and sports people.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with [...]

So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the [...]

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).
No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that [...]

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).
Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.
Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton [...]

Fantastic Art (1973).
Cover: Earth by Arcimboldo.
I’d thought of writing something about this book series even before I started this weblog since there’s very little information to be found about it online. I can’t compete with the serious Penguin-heads—and I’m not much of a dedicated book collector anyway—but I do have a decent collection of [...]

A solidly gay day for secondhand books with the discovery of two relatively obscure items by gay artists. Philip Core is probably more well-known as a writer than a painter, author of The Original Eye: Arbiters of Twentieth Century Taste and the masterful Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (both 1984 and both out [...]

So, another week, another gay sex scandal in America… Schadenfreude levels are going through the roof with all this happening days before a critical midterm election. Latest culprit is Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals who yesterday was denying that he paid for sex with a male escort and bought [...]