“He was a Brothers Grimm of fashion, enchanting and captivating the audience with the most incredibly beautiful clothes, only to make their stomachs lurch with the underlying menace that shot through his work. Because every show contained outfits designed to thrill, shock – and catch the eye of picture editors – many people never realised that much of McQueen’s work was, quite simply, heart-stoppingly gorgeous: exquisite tailoring, beautifully sculpted dresses and glorious print.”
Jess Cartner-Morley. (More.)

Butterfly-print dresses (how fitting for Darwin Day), Giger-style shoe designs, skull key chains… Yes, Alexander McQueen was something special.

Guardian obituary | Independent obituary

Pathways (1973). A slightly reworked version of the original painting.

“Science fiction is unfortunate in having a most unsatisfactory framework of existence—it’s considered literary kitsch. I believe it should be the mainstream of literature because all the books that have become important down the generations of civilisation have been books about ideas. Superficially, science fiction would seem to offer the most scope for idea content, but the promise is unfulfilled. Good ideas and good writing rarely coincide. All too often the medium is used for entertainment alone and its potential beyond this should be obvious to everyone. I don’t just mean in the sense of fantasy technology. The potential for anticipating human evolution is there and perhaps the means to bring it about and definitely the means to bring about a social evolution.”

Roger Dean, interviewed in Visions of the Future (1976).

If popularity is often a curse as well as a blessing, it’s been Roger Dean‘s curse to see his work dismissed along with many other products of a decade with more than its share of cultural heroes and villains, the 1970s. Music journalists in Britain have for years given the impression that the arrival of the Sex Pistols in 1976 swept away all that preceded them, in particular bands such as Yes whose album covers had helped raise the visibility of Dean’s art to an international level. This is not only a lazy assumption, it’s also wrong. When Yes released Going For the One in 1977 it was their first studio album in three years yet despite the punk explosion it went to no. 1 in the UK album charts, while a rare single release from the band made the UK top ten. Yes were playing sell-out tours in Europe and the US in 1977 and 78, as were Pink Floyd whose The Wall was massively popular worldwide in 1979. Punk didn’t sweep prog away, what happened with its advent was that progressive rock and everything associated with it—Roger Dean’s art included—became critically disreputable almost overnight, such that no journalist would dare say anything good about it. That disrepute has persisted for thirty years despite a lasting and indelible influence; this is an old argument but certain facts often need restating anew. *

Views (1975).

I was 13 in September 1975 when Roger Dean’s first collection of his illustration and design work, Views, was published. At that time, I hadn’t heard any of the music to which his paintings and drawings were attached, and I didn’t even see a copy of the book until February 1976 when I happened to be in London on a school trip and found a big pile of what I guess was the second edition in Foyle’s book shop. This appeared at exactly the right moment; I wasn’t listening to the music but I was reading a lot of science fiction and was starting to notice and imitate the work of various paperback artists. I recognised many of the pictures in Views from the covers displayed in the window of our local record shop, Cobweb, whose shopping-bag logo was a cowled magician figure à la Dean or Rodney Matthews. It’s difficult to say what struck me about Dean’s work at the time since you rarely articulate your preferences at that age. I think I liked the consistency of vision and the invention which blended the organic and mechanical, the architecture which looked at once ancient and futuristic, and the flat landscapes which put lone pine trees into rocky terrain familiar from Japanese and Chinese prints. For a teenager his style was also relatively easy to imitate if you forgot about basic things such as imagination and finesse, and I spent a year producing a lot of badly-drawn reptiles posed against lurid watercolour skies.

Motown Chartbusters Vol. Six (1971).

Dean was packaging many different kinds of bands and styles of music throughout the early Seventies, most notably Yes, for whom he also helped design stage sets, but also various folk rock artists on the Vertigo label, turgid rockers like Uriah Heep and Budgie, and Afrobeat groups like Osibisa and Assagai; he even did a cover for a Motown compilation. But he remained resolute throughout in using the album cover to explore his own obsessions and design concerns. It was this latter aspect of his work which surprised me when I finally got my hands on a copy of Views late in 1976 and discovered that these weren’t mere illustrations but were often coming out of his explorations of furniture and architectural design. In that respect, his work is a lot less like the artists he’s usually grouped with—fantasists such as Rodney Matthews or Brian Froud, or the popular sf illustrators of the decade like Chris Foss—but is closer to the speculative industrial designs of futurist Syd Mead. The outsized reptiles and surreal moments in Dean’s pictures tended to obscure the architectural speculation, whilst being the very elements which made him so popular. That popularity coincided with a boom in poster art which made him easy to dismiss later on as part of the reprehensible hippy froth of the era. What people missed then, and continue to miss when he’s branded as merely another illustrator, is the obsessive reworking of vistas and visual motifs—dragons, Asian rock formations, pine trees, floating islands—whose origin is the same psychological impulse which birthed the internal landscapes of the Surrealists or the jungles and deserts of JG Ballard. Dean’s landscapes are frequently depopulated and appear dream-bright, awaiting the arrival of a new breed of colonists for their porous architecture. It’s no surprise that his work in recent years has caught the attention of filmmakers and games designers.

Yessongs (1973).

The success of Views had one lasting benefit in that it launched the Dragon’s Dream/Paper Tiger publishing imprints which made the work of many science fiction and fantasy illustrators available in lavish book form. Among the early run of titles was the first proper study of album cover art, The Album Cover Album (1977), produced in collaboration with Hipgnosis, and a Syd Mead collection, Sentinel (1978). When I started hanging around the Savoy bookshops in Manchester in the 1980s I was surprised to see Roger Dean’s autograph on the wall of what used to be Bookchain in Peter Street. His scrawled name and accompanying dragon head had been left there in 1979 when he turned up to sign copies of Views along with three of the artists from the Dragon’s Dream volume The Studio—Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson and Jeff Jones—who also signed the shop wall.

Dean’s 1969 logo for Harvest Records, a division of EMI.

Dean’s art has been out of critical favour for so long that it’s difficult to discuss it positively without sounding overly defensive. While many other shunned aspects of the pre-punk era have been rehabilitated—folk music, psychedelic drugs, flares—I’ve yet to see anyone mount a serious reappraisal of Dean’s artwork despite his furniture and architecture designs having been exhibited at the V&A. There’s a certain kind of critic, usually male and British, who finds the exercise of a Romantic imagination to be a suspect and unwholesome activity. That suspicion often sees a single “story” being told in art history which skips from Impressionism to Cubism and ignores the Symbolists and Decadents; it dismisses Dalí’s work after the 1930s and won’t even look at the paintings of HR Giger, Ernst Fuchs or Mati Klarwein; it’s a suspicion which marginalised Mervyn Peake almost to the year of his death in 1968, which scowls at genre fiction and ignored JG Ballard (always a proud science fiction writer) until his Booker Prize nomination in 1984. Minimalism and restraint is favoured over exuberant invention, and a blokey cynicism is favoured over any kind of visionary impulse which is seen as tasteless or kitsch, with “kitsch” in this context almost always meaning “whatever I dislike”. For every Marina Warner, Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker or China Miéville who assert and promote the value of the imagination, you’ll find a vocal crowd who find the whole thing to be unpalatable and juvenile. It’s an older argument than punk versus hippy, going back at least to the nineteenth century debate between Realism and Romanticism. It’s also a peculiarly joyless English attitude; the French have shared the debate as far back as Zola but are generally a lot happier for serious intellectual dialogue to sit side-by-side with comics, movies, science fiction and fantasy.

Blue by John Dummer featuring Nick Pickett (1972). One of Dean’s die-cut sleeves for Vertigo Records.

I’d argue that it’s the perceived “bad taste” quality of Dean’s work, and his guilt-by-association with a disreputable period of music, which has delayed any reassessment of his art and cover designs. Barney Bubbles was a great graphic designer exactly contemporary with Dean—both worked for Vertigo in the early Seventies—but as an illustrator Bubbles’ work is nearly always playing riffs on styles or motifs borrowed from elsewhere, and is less original as a result. Bubbles escaped the wrath of punk dismissal by being personally evasive, dropping the hippy elements from his work and becoming house designer for Stiff Records in 1976. Roger Dean, meanwhile, simply carried on being Roger Dean and the powerful illustration side of his art continued to overshadow his design interests. Since design critics are nearly always the ones who write the histories, they tend to favour graphic design over illustration; design is the intellectual component, it’s functional and has a job to do. Illustration, on the other hand, is often treated as mere decoration. The attitude of writer and designer Jon Wozencroft, discussing album cover design in The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (1988), is typical:

Work done by Roger Dean for the group Yes cannot really be counted in this category, for although his cover design posters adorned many bedroom walls in 1973, their content was no more challenging than an airbrushed greetings card.

I wonder whether Wozencroft has seen Dean’s 1971 sleeve for Motown Chartbusters Volume 6, whose beetle spacecraft certainly challenges expectations for how a pop/soul compilation should look? As for challenging the form of the album package, there’s the elaborate die-cut sleeves which Dean was creating for Vertigo at this time, and his design for Dutch band Earth & Fire which had some of the artwork printed on the inside of the sleeve envelope and therefore largely hidden from view. With a few rare exceptions, graphic designers usually only influence other graphic designers whereas the influence of a good artist or illustrator permeates the wider culture. Singularity of vision counts for a lot, whether it’s HR Giger‘s creations for Alien or Syd Mead’s work on Blade Runner and Tron. I happen to rate Dean as a graphic designer in his own right, for his beautifully simple Harvest Records logo, for those die-cut Vertigo sleeves, and for his elegant and futuristic extensions of Art Nouveau lettering and the typographic stylings of the San Francisco poster artists. But it’s the body of his artwork which has the lasting influence. Nearly every review I’ve seen of James Cameron’s Avatar has referred to its visual character as resembling a 1970s album cover, by which they mean it looks like a Roger Dean painting. Accusations of plagiarism have proliferated once people realised that Dean’s floating mountains, looped rock formations and flying reptile fauna predate Avatar‘s by many years. That Dean’s work can represent an entire decade is a measure of its significance even if the theft of his landscapes and the use to which they are put—a backdrop for more of Cameron’s simple-minded belligerence—is something the artist wouldn’t want.

Morning Dragon.

Dean’s influence will continue not least because new generations don’t care about the old battles and unexamined prejudices of the punk era. With the wholesale fragmentation of popular culture, artists today curate their influences based more on their own interests and obsessions than on the dictats of critics, and what critics there are have become smaller voices struggling to be heard in a global discussion. Views sold over a million copies and is still in print along with Dean’s subsequent books; his work is easy to find even if few care to examine it seriously. The writings of JG Ballard and Philip K Dick gained widespread popularity when the world began to more closely resemble their fiction. In Roger Dean’s case, technology is now better able to bring his imagination to life. Over the past decade we’ve seen the creation of buildings which resemble his organic designs while his holistic approach to architecture and the environment is more widely accepted than it was when Views first appeared. Hollywood and games designers have the means to create the kinds of worlds Dean was imagining thirty years ago but as the technology accelerates in scope and power the visions it might render remain in short supply, hence the recourse to a Dean or a Giger or a Syd Mead whose Tron designs return in a sequel later this year. Dean’s art was never intended to épater le bourgeois and he wasn’t aiming to be the El Lissitzky of the 1970s; to berate him for failing this not only misses the point but ignores the singularity and lasting quality of his work.

* Progressive rock’s disrepute has been so ingrained that it’s taken Alan McGee over thirty years to admit that it might be okay to listen to some post-Barrett Pink Floyd. In a similar vein, The Wire is the most open-minded of all the current music mags but the King Crimson and Yes reappraisals in their December 2009 issue were the first substantial pieces they’ve run on either band.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002
• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Re-release poster by Bemis Balkind.

Alien was a big deal for me when it appeared in late 1979, one of those films which seems to arrive at exactly the right moment. I’d just left school, I was eagerly reading reprints of French and Belgian comic strips in Heavy Metal magazine, and also paperback reprints of science fiction stories from New Worlds; I was listening to Hawkwind and becoming increasingly obsessed with HP Lovecraft. I was, in short, the target audience for a serious sf-themed horror film with contributions from major artists like HR Giger and Jean “Moebius” Giraud, and I went to see it three times in a row.

Watching Star Wars two years earlier (for which Dan O’Bannon created the computer displays), I’d enjoyed the special effects but been disappointed by its space opera tone and dumb heroics. HR Giger’s large-format Necronomicon art book was published in the UK the same year and the sight of his work was a revelation for the way it pushed Dalí-esque Surrealism to a pitch of unprecedented mutation and malevolence. A year later his paintings were appearing in Omni magazine but it was Alien which exploded his popularity and in 1979 you could hardly open a magazine or newspaper without finding a Giger interview or examples of his work. Alien benefited from the sf boom that Star Wars generated but Dan O’Bannon didn’t need George Lucas’s feeble mythology to point him towards science fiction, he’d already made one low-budget sf film, Dark Star, with John Carpenter, and was planning the effects for Jodorowsky’s ill-fated Dune project years before the world had heard of Luke Skywalker. Dune introduced him to Moebius, and the pair collaborated on a noir sf strip, The Long Tomorrow, which was published in Heavy Metal in 1977. But it was Giger’s connection with the Dune project which proved crucial for Alien:

“(Dune) collapsed so badly,” O’Bannon says, “that I ended up in L.A. without any money, without an apartment, without a car, with half my belongings back in Paris and the other half in storage.”

He retreated to the sofa of a friend, screenwriter Ron Shusett, and didn’t leave it for a week. But depressed or not, O’Bannon knew he had to get back to work. He got his files and typewriter out of storage, and he and Shusett went to work on stacks and stacks of partially completed ideas.

“We pulled out one that I liked very much,” he says, “an old script called Memory that was half-finished and was basically what the first half of Alien is now. I told Ron I’d never been able to figure out the rest of the story. So he read it and said, ‘Well, you told me another idea you had once for a movie. It was the one where gremlins get onto a B-17 bomber during World War II and give the pilots a lot of trouble. So why don’t you make that the second half and put it on a spaceship?’

“That was a great idea, but then we had to figure out the monster. Well, I hadn’t been able to get Hans Rudi Giger off my mind since I left France. His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster.”

The working title was Star Beast. O’Bannon had a fortunate brainstorm late one night as he continued to write while Shusett slept. “I was writing dialogue and one of the characters said, ‘What are we going to do about the alien?’ The word came out of the page at me and I said, ‘Alien. It’s a noun and an adjective.’ So I went in the other room and shook Ron awake and told him and he said, ‘Yeah, OK,’ and went back to sleep. But I knew I had found a really hot title.” The Book of Alien (1979).

Lest we forget, it was O’Bannon that insisted Ridley Scott look at Giger’s work during the production of the film after artist Ron Cobb failed to produce a sufficiently nightmarish creature. O’Bannon’s script was mauled by Walter Hill who removed sub-plots, and further scenes were trimmed to speed the pace, but Alien‘s unique atmosphere remains as potent today as it was in 1979. It’s ironic that O’Bannon died in the week that James Cameron’s Avatar (which happens to star Sigourney Weaver) is released. To watch all four Alien films in sequence is to witness progressively diminishing returns, and it was Cameron’s sequel which set the pattern for the later films by dropping the adjective part of the O’Bannon’s title in favour of the noun. There had been plenty of movie monsters before but it was that inhuman quality which we call “alien” that O’Bannon and Giger brought to sf cinema, and it’s a quality that few have been able to deliver since, not least in Avatar which (from what I’ve seen) looks less alien than something Frank R Paul might have painted in the 1930s. O’Bannon did a lot more after Alien, of course, but it’s his first big success which will always mean the most to me. I recommend Ridley Scott’s director’s cut from 2003 which restored scenes and shots removed from the original release.

• Remembering the late, great Dan O’Bannon
• The first action heroine: Ellen Ripley and Alien, 30 years on

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

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

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 heaviest book I’ve ever come across, 400 pages of heavy-duty art paper at BIG size. (Amazon gives the dimensions as 16.1 x 12.6 x 2.3 inches or 409 x 320 x 580 mm.) The photo above shows the scale beside an old Mountains of Madness paperback (Ian Miller‘s cover art appears in full in the new book) and my own Haunter of the Dark collection. The cover art is by Michael Whelan, a detail from his wonderful 1981 HPL panoramas.

The Virgil Finlay section showing The Colour Out of Space and his definitive Lovecraft portrait.

The range of contributors past and present includes JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Hannes Bok, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V. Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, Frank Frazetta, John Holmes, Harry O. Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, Thomas Ligotti and John Jude Palencar. The introduction is by Harlan Ellison and there’s an afterword by Thomas Ligotti. Many pages fold out to reveal spreads like the Giger ones below. Print quality is exceptional, of course, but then ladling the superlatives is pointless when it’s obvious this is a sui generis masterpiece of Lovecraftian art. Naturally I’m very happy indeed to be a part of it.

A pair of Necronoms by HR Giger.

I don’t have to photograph too much since other people have been doing the same with their copies. Matt Staggs has more pictures of the contents here and Jeff VanderMeer has made the book a feature of his latest art column for io9. Jeff talks to Centipede Press’s Jerad Walters about the book’s production and notes on his own blog what an important, landmark volume this is. Having done my fair share of book production I can imagine what an undertaking it was. Jerad should be very pleased he’s been able to put together a book which bests the productions of multinational publishers with their armies of staff. And we might even ask why it’s left to a small independent publisher to produce something of this quality at all.

Jeff asked me a few questions for his io9 piece which I’m reproducing in full here.

• Everyone knows what Lovecraft means to fantasy and horror. What do you think he meant for the idea of “cosmic SF”?

JC: The young Lovecraft was a keen astronomer who became acquainted at an early age with a sense of cosmic scale, the vastness of the universe and so on. That combined with a natural pessimism and his later atheism gave him a strong sense of human insignificance in the face of cosmic enormity. “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,” as he says at the opening of The Call of Cthulhu.

His problem as a writer was that most Western supernatural fiction up to that point had some kind of Christian dimension to it, even if this wasn’t directly stated. That was obviously a problem for an atheist writing a form of fiction which needed something malevolent at its core. His solution was to replace the Devil and the Christian idea of evil with vast extra-dimensional entities which disturb or threaten us either because we mean as much to them as microbes do to human beings or (in the case of Cthulhu) they’re eager to take reclaim the earth for their own destructive ends. All of Lovecraft’s best fiction tends to be sf used for horror purposes; he’s telling the same old tales about what might lurk in the dark beyond the campfire, only the campfire is now the planet Earth and the dark is the interstellar void.

• What personally resonates with you re Lovecraft?

JC: I think initially it was that skilful blend of sf and horror. When I was a kid I always enjoyed reading ghosts stories as much as science fiction. The first story of Lovecraft’s I read was The Colour Out of Space, a tale of a meteorite which crashes near a farm and whose insidious infection slowly affects the farm and the surrounding countryside. That’s an incredibly chilling story—one of his very best—and yet there’s nothing supernatural in it. In his best work he builds a sinister atmosphere to a remarkable degree, something he’d learned by studying previous writers. Other writers of the period and even more recent writers often seem lightweight in comparison. Later on I got drawn into the tangled web of the Cthulhu Mythos which is a compelling attraction for new readers.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

• How did you put your personal stamp on your Lovecraft-influenced art?

JC: I wanted to take Lovecraft’s fiction seriously on its own terms, something which—in the comics world especially—wasn’t happening very often. When I started illustrating his work in the 1980s there was little apart from the Lovecraft special issue of Heavy Metal from 1979 which had attempted that. I tried to match his dense writing style with an equally dense and detailed drawing style and tried to make things look solid and historically accurate. I’ve always been interested in architecture and Lovecraft’s concept of alien architecture continues to fascinate; I explored that in a small way last year in a picture commissioned for a Swiss exhibition (below).

Detail from “Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city” (2007).

• Lovecraft clearly tapped into something hidden or buried in readers. What was it, as far as you’re concerned?

I’ve thought for years that the invented mythology is one of the things which really hits people, even if they don’t read many of the stories. It was this which powered the Call of Cthulhu role-playing games. People don’t have to be religious to feel the draw of a mythology or invented taxonomy, you can see that in other areas whether it’s Star Trek, Star Wars or Harry Potter. That’s probably the juvenile attraction; the more sophisticated one would be the attraction for people such as Michel Houellebecq who see Lovecraft as a kind of pulp Kafka or Camus. You can be drawn into his writing by something trivial like Hello Cthulhu then journey deeper to discover a great imagination at work and even a philosophical viewpoint; anything that works on all those levels we need to label “art”.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror comics
• The art of Ian Miller
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Witness my hand and official seal
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

Beowulf wrestles with Grendel, Lynd Ward (1939).

There’s nothing new in pointing out Hollywood’s crimes against literature, the film business has been screwing up book adaptation since the earliest days of silent cinema. But sometimes the wound is so grievous you can’t help but speak out, in this case against Roger Avary’s Beowulf which is released next month. This is another CGI-heavy confection along the lines Polar Express, with the actors being given digital bodies via motion-capture, and it’s something I’d probably have ignored until I saw this picture of Grendel, the story’s principal monster. Beowulf is one of the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems and Grendel, the bloodthirsty creature which Beowulf battles, is one of the ur-fiends of English literature, along with his equally monstrous, lake-dwelling mother and the dragon which fatally wounds the hero. The trio give us a peek back into the dark imagination from a time before recorded history and Grendel especially has always had something raw and primal about its character. So when you see a beast with such a history portrayed as little more than a diseased muppet you wonder what’s going on. Are the creators inept? Ignorant? Were studio restrictions at work? How does an industry with the talent to give splendid life to the trolls and Balrog of Lord of the Rings, or Davy Jones and crew in Pirates of the Caribbean, screw up so badly?

Illustration by Michael Leonard (1970).

The grim demon was called Grendel, a notorious ranger of the borderlands, who inhabited the fastnesses of moors and fens. This unhappy being had long lived in the land of monsters, because God had damned him along with the children of Cain. For the eternal Lord avenged the killing of Abel. He took no delight in that feud, but banished Cain from humanity because of his crime. From Cain were hatched all evil progenies: ogres, hobgoblins, and monsters, not to mention the giants who fought so long against God?for which they suffered due retribution.

Grendel is described thus in the David Wright translation, my first contact with the dread beast when we read the Panther edition at school in the early Seventies. I’d guess it was that book which also introduced Neil Gaiman (co-writer of the new film) to the story, since we’re both about the same age. The book caught me at the right time since I was already besotted with Norse mythology via Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths and Legends of the Norsemen and I loved the way that Michael Leonard’s stylised cover illustration (which wraps around the book) hints at much but still allows room for the imagination. Beowulf marks the point when the old myths of monsters and dragons become subject to an increasingly obtrusive Christian morality. The rationale for Grendel being one of the “sons of Cain” has always seemed laboured and unconvincing, however, as though the new religion had been written over something far older and far darker. It’s never quite clear what Grendel and his mother are, which is a great part of their attraction; as with HP Lovecraft’s monstrosities, our imagination rushes to fill the void left by the sketched outline.

Illustration by Michael Leonard (1973).

Having said that, there’s no doubt as to Grendel’s nature in this tremendous representation (highlighted with gold ink), also by Michael Leonard and a great example of Picador book design at its height. It’s a shame that Gardner’s book, which tells the story of Beowulf from the viewpoint of the monster, fails to live up to the promise of the illustration, which does justice to a creature described as killing fifteen men while they sleep. Gardner’s narrative is more a satire than a horror tale with the creature in a perpetual state of bemusement at the antics of the men he preys upon. The book has its supporters but I found the jokey tone and anachronisms increasingly annoying. Jeff Sypeck points out some flaws in Gardner’s approach here.

As an aside, I didn’t realise Michael Leonard was a gay artist until I did a search to see what he might be doing now. In common with many illustrators, he’s left the field to pursue more personal work, in this case hyper-real still lifes and finely-rendered figure studies like the one below.

Against the Glass (2001).

I haven’t seen the science fiction film version of Beowulf from 1999 or Beowulf and Grendel from 2005, and going by the silly caveman/hobo look of Grendel in the latter I’d say that was probably a good thing. It’s possible, if you want to stretch the point, to see HR Giger’s creature in Alien as another incarnation of Grendel. Why? Because of the moment when the crew of the ship realise they have a killer on board and Ash calls it “Kane’s son”, Kane being the unfortunate crew member who gives birth to the beast.

The most interesting adaptation to date is The Thirteenth Warrior, a flawed film but one that holds together despite its troubled production. This was based on Michael Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead which takes the demystification route but in a consistent fashion, with Grendel becoming the Wendol, a tribe of head-hunting evolutionary throwbacks who prey upon an isolated village. Despite explaining away the story’s supernatural qualities, the film has its own chills, especially when the “fire snake” appears (whose true nature I won’t spoil here). The most surprising aspect of the film now is the role played by Antonio Banderas, the thirteenth warrior of the title and also a Muslim hero, something that wouldn’t be allowed in a big-budget Hollywood film today.

At home with the Wendol: The Thirteenth Warrior (1999).

Antonio Banderas came to prominence with his eye candy roles for Pedro Almodovar and it’s perhaps fitting that a gay artist should have illustrated Beowulf at least once, muscle-bound epics having what you might call a dual appeal. Bearing that in mind, there’s this curious statement given by Roger Avary to Entertainment Weekly about the new film, which sees portly Ray Winstone as the hero, slimmed down to a gleaming, six-packed action figure:

When I wrote it, I envisaged the character of Den in the Heavy Metal comic. Den was a character by Richard Corben, who was easily one of my favorite artists. [Den] was this muscular guy with a gigantic schlong. He would always go into battle and beat the hell out of people, totally in the buff. He never wore clothes. That kind of stuck with me. I love it when somebody takes something like a fight?or really any event?and twists it to the point where you’re naked doing it. Also, there was a proud tradition of berserkers going into battle naked. It just shows how fearless you are. I don’t know about you, but if someone came at me, like, ”Aaaaargh!” naked, I’d be, ”Whoa!” Had we done it [like] Richard Corben’s Den, the MPAA would have had huge, huge problems. As it is, I think the movie is going to have to achieve a more tempered rating. I don’t think that we’re going to be [seeing] Beowulf’s gigantic, you know, baby’s-arm-holding-an-apple-sized schlong onscreen. However, because this is performance-capture, it’s not inconceivable that, at some point down the road, they simply re-render, widen-out shots, move things out of the way and put together a hard-R or NC-17 version of the movie.

Er, okay Roger, do you have something you want to tell us? As with the egregious Frank Miller and 300, which managed the feat of being homophobic and homoerotic simultaneously, there seem to be some unexplored issues at work here. Well I’m afraid even the addition of CGI schlongs is unlikely to make me want to watch Avary’s film (sorry Neil). The Thirteenth Warrior is grittier and closer to the spirit of the original tale despite its radical reworking and I’ll take the real Antonio over a plastic Ray Winstone any day.

The Lynd Ward picture at the top of this page comes from Beowulf: A New Verse Translation for Fireside and Classroom, Heritage Press, 1939. I looked at Ward’s God’s Man back in August and Eddie Campbell noted recently that his work is featured in a new collection. You can see the rest of Ward’s marvellous Beowulf illustrations here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Men with snakes
• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward
• Davy Jones

• Some of my Lovecraft art is to be featured in a lavish limited edition volume from Centipede Press.

Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft
Centipede Press is now accepting pre-orders.
A unique art book available in a cloth slipcase edition and leather deluxe edition.

• Cloth edition in slipcase—2,000 copies—400 pages, four color, sewn with cloth covers, enclosed in a cloth covered slipcase. Front cover image, black embossing, two ribbon markers, fold-outs, detail views.

• The first 300 orders will receive a numbered copy with a special slipcase and a hardcover folder with an extensive suite of unbound illustrations. $395 postpaid.

• Leather edition in traycase—50 copies—400 pages, four color, sewn with full leather binding, enclosed in a giant size traycase. Front cover image debossed on front, two ribbon markers, fold-outs, detail views, signed by most living contributors. $2,000 postpaid.

This huge tome features over forty artists including JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, John Coulthart, John Holmes, Harry O Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, and dozens of others.

The field has never seen an art book like this—indeed, it is an art anthology unlike anything ever published before. Many of these works have never before seen publication. Many are printed as special multi-page fold-outs, and several have detail views. The book is filled with four color artwork throughout, all of it printed full page on rich black backgrounds. A special thumbnail gallery allows you to overview the entire contents of this 400-page book at a glance, with notations on artist, work title, publication information, size, and location, when known.

HP Lovecraft fans will simply have to have this book. Because of its sheer size and scope, this book will never be reprinted and will sell out very quickly. Twenty years down the road people will be paying huge prices for this book because of its scope and the quality of reproductions. This is the HP Lovecraft fan’s dream come true. Don’t miss it!

Yes, it is indeed expensive but this is a book for serious collectors.

• Bryan Talbot‘s new book, Alice in Sunderland, is finally out. Read a review of it here.

• Arthur Magazine is being summoned back from Avalon, which is excellent news. To celebrate, Jay Babcock has posted Alan Moore‘s history of pornography in its entirety here.

left to right: Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Kenneth Anger.

One of my favourite photographs of all time shows four directors at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, all dolled up in their wildest afghan-and-ascot, hairy-hippy finery, and all of them on the cusp of what should have been majestic, transformative, transgressive careers in cinema that by and large never came to fruition. It was not to be—if only it had been.

• John Patterson tell you why we need Jodorowsky as much as we ever did.

Update: And while we’re at it, Eddie Campbell also has a new book out, The Black Diamond Detective Agency. Great playbill cover design.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Another favourite painting for many years and Böcklin’s most well-known work.

Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) produced several different versions of the painting. All versions depict an oarsman and a standing white-clad figure in a small boat crossing an expanse of dark water towards a rocky island. In the boat is an object usually taken to be a coffin. The white-clad figure is often taken to be Charon, and the water analogous to the Acheron. Böcklin himself provided neither public explanation as to the meaning of the painting nor the title, which was conferred upon it by the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in 1883. The first version of the painting, which is currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, was created in 1880 on a request by Marie Berna, whose husband had recently died.

I—1880, oil on board, 29 x 48 in (74 x 122 cm) New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reisinger Fund, since 1926.

II—1880, oil on canvas, 111 x 115 cm Basel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, since 1920.

III—1883, oil on board, 80 x 150 cm, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, since 1980.

IV—1884, oil on copper, 81 x 151 cm, Lugano, Sammlung Schloss Rohoncz; whereabouts unknown (destroyed during the Second World War?).

V—1886, 80 x 150 cm, Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste.

Böcklin’s picture proved to be influential as well as popular. Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote a symphonic poem of the same name based upon the painting in 1909. The haunting image also crept into the cinematic world when film producers and production designers began looking at paintings for inspiration. Some of the views of Skull Island in the original version of King Kong bear a striking resemblance to the rock formations in the Leipzig version. A few years later, producer Val Lewton (also at RKO where King Kong was made) developed something of an obsession with the picture, first putting the Leipzig painting in the background of scenes in I Walked With a Zombie then finally making a film of the same name that’s actually set on a Greek island resembling Böcklin’s.

There are other later influences, among them the third act of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film The Tales of Hoffman, set on a similarly-styled Greek island, and several homages by another Swiss artist, HR Giger. Bocklin’s name also lives on in the Art Nouveau typeface, Arnold Bocklin, designed by Otto Weisert in 1904.

Since this has been an obsession, I’ve paid homage myself, of course. Böcklin is quoted twice in my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu, the second time when the sailors approach R’lyeh.

Update: added a copy of the destroyed version.

• Toteninsel.net