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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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Reineke Fuchs, Einband der Ausgabe des Versepos von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1846).
From Wikimedia Commons’ stock of images related to the medieval trickster hero, and another great cover showing the 19th century art of the blocked binding. In a similar vein, don’t miss these marvellous illustrations at BibliOdyssey.

Reineke als Sieger by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1846).
Elsewhere [...]

The Art of Illuminating As Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times by WR Symms (1860).
From the days when blocking was an art. One of a number of lavish board designs which can be found at Fromoldbooks.org.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Decorated Russian book covers
• The [...]

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• Nabokov book covers

• Netherlands decorated books

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: [...]

Inspiration (1949).
Karel Zemen (1910–1989) is a filmmaker I’m often telling people about but whose work isn’t easy to see. So it’s good to find that YouTube has gained some clips of his animations and examples of the partly-animated adventure films he made in the Fifties and Sixties. Zeman was yet another great Czech animator [...]

An unmade high-concept from Hammer Films’ early Seventies dalliance with pulp adventure, if you must know. Via Boing Boing via Jess Nevins via Airminded where we learn:
The story was along the lines of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, with a German Zeppelin being blown off-course during a bombing raid on London and winding up at [...]

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), directed by Georges Méliès and loosely inspired by the works of Jules Verne and HG Wells. Hard to believe this inventive little film is now over a hundred years old. Méliès made over 500 shorts like this, many of them just as clever and beguiling.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive