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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 [...]

Continuing from yesterday’s post, these nameless characters were sketches for a proposed comic strip that writer Jamie Delano and I were planning in the mid-Nineties. We had a feeling that the long-neglected pirate genre was due for a revival and talked about a revisionist take on buccaneering which would dispense with the Robert Newton antics [...]

“For all the world I was led like a dancing bear” by NC Wyeth (1911).
This year’s reading began with a desire to explore some of the Robert Louis Stevenson volumes in my collection which I’ve so far neglected. At the moment I’m thinking of maybe reading everything I have by RLS, having begun with [...]

The Mermaid by Howard Pyle (1910).
A print of Howard Pyle’s wonderful mermaid painting adorns my bathroom and after looking at the Delaware Art Gallery page I’m surprised to discover that it was left unfinished. The Delaware gallery has more of Pyle’s work including his strikingly sparse pirate painting Marooned, which appeared on the cover [...]

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin

• [...]

A few servings of iTunes jelly.
I’ve spent the past week or so enjoying the delights of Leopard, the 10.5 iteration of Apple’s OS X operating system, but have only just noticed the new Visualizer patterns in the latest version of iTunes. I don’t use the Visualizer much, especially since the introduction of Front Row, Apple’s [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow by Howard Pyle (1905).
Seeing as how Johnny Depp and co. are sailing the Spanish Main once more (to mixed reviews, unfortunately), now is perhaps a suitable moment to note the genesis of our popular conception of buccaneers. The famous characters of the Wild West were being mythologised while [...]

No, not Pirates of the Caribbean III although that film will be with us soon and is certain to contain at least one of the above ingredients. The dubious delights of exploitation cinema have been put back on the map recently by Grindhouse, the double feature from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, but garish melodrama [...]

French comic artist and illustrator, Philippe Druillet, illustrates British horror novelist William Hope Hodgson. As anyone familiar with Hodgson’s work knows, this kind of imagery predates Pirates of the Caribbean by nearly a century. More pictures here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• War of the Worlds book covers
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Le horreur cosmique
• [...]

The great Hal Willner is doing his eclectic thing again. A marvellous collection of folk ballads. Nice cover as well, from Howard Pyle’s celebrated pirate paintings.
Disc: 1
1. Cape Cod Girls—Baby Gramps
2. Mingulay Boat Song—Richard Thompson
3. My Son John—John C. Reilly
4. Fire Down Below—Nick Cave
5. Turkish Revelry—Loudon Wainwright III
6. Bully In The Alley—The Old Prunes
7. The [...]

I’ll be in Paris this week so some French-related postings are in order.
Michel Houellebecq’s HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (which I still haven’t read) has been in the news again recently, with a number of reviews appearing in UK newspapers and magazines, most of which present the by-now rather tired spectacle of reviewers [...]

No, not the dreadful singer from The Monkees but he of the undersea locker and also the new villain in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Bill Nighy plays this splendidly-designed character, with the assistance of some CGI to get those tentacles working. I’ve still not seen the first film but the look of [...]

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This landmark comic book, one of the few to deserve the designation “graphic novel”, remains a particular favourite of mine, and one that still excites today for its consummate command of the comics medium. The following is a [...]