Apr 29, 2013

Scena Illustrata was an Italian magazine that continued to fly the flag for Art Nouveau into the 1920s, by which time the style’s organic flourishes were looking old-fashioned when compared to the rectilinear forms of early Art Deco. This cover is from 1921 but could easily have appeared any time in the past two decades. [...]
Feb 3, 2013

Weird Tales, October 1933. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. • Michael Moorcock’s novels are being republished this year by Gollancz in a range of print and digital editions. Publishing Perspectives asks Is Now a Perfect Time for a Michael Moorcock Revival? • Related: Dangerous Minds posted The Chronicle of the Black Sword: A Sword & Sorcery [...]
Jun 10, 2012

“Venus moves across the Sun in this image captured by Japan’s satellite Hinode, on June 6, 2012.” Via. The imagery in Ah Pook covered a wide range of ideas. A train full of Mayan Gods for instance travelled through various time zones to end up alongside a carnival in a red brick town outside St [...]
Mar 4, 2012

The Arcimboldo Effect again. An undated postcard from the image section of A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain. “I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they’d just had a close encounter,” said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, [...]
Jul 17, 2011

Neutron Drip (2011) by Amrei Hofstätter. • The Lavender Scare is “the first feature-length documentary film to tell the story of the U.S. government’s ruthless campaign in the 1950s and ’60s to hunt down and fire every Federal employee it suspected was gay”. A film by Josh Howard based on the book by David K [...]
Apr 3, 2011

Ancient Egyptian capitals from The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by Owen Jones at Egyptian Revival. • Golden Age Comic Book Stories has been pulling out all the stops recently with entries for Will Bradley, Alphonse Mucha’s Documents Decoratifs (a companion volume to Combinaisons Ornementales), and pages from My Name is Paris (1987) illustrated by Michael [...]
Jul 18, 2010

Planet of the Apes Magazine #15 (1975), art by Bob Larkin. I never read any of Marvel Comics’ Planet of the Apes titles but the painted covers of the American editions are evidence of a distinctly lurid imagination. An excess of drugs—this was the Seventies, after all—or mere enthusiasm? You decide. Related: “The Soft Intelligence”: [...]
Dec 5, 2007

Dr. Strangelove titles (1964). There’s less of his work around than there should be, unfortunately. Saul Bass is justly celebrated for his title sequences and poster designs yet Pablo Ferro—whose titles were equally innovative and memorable—is rarely heard of even though you’ll have seen a lot of his work. Bullitt titles (1968). Ferro’s advertising films [...]