{illustrators} – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Akihiro Yamada’s Lovecraftiana

Akihiro Yamada is a Japanese illustrator and manga artist best known for his work in the sub-genre of historical fantasy, as well as character design for video games and other media. All of this art is very accomplished—he’s great with lengths of billowing fabric—while giving no hint at all of his earlier detours into cosmic horror. I’ve been familiar for some time with a couple of his covers in the “Cthulhu” series (c. 1988–1993) but hadn’t gone looking for the entire run until now. Doing so turned up another series of books published in the early 2000s by Kurodahan Press, Lairs of the Hidden Gods, with a quartet of covers in which the traditional Japanese print-making theme of the four seasons is given a demonic twist. All of these books are reprints of stories by Lovecraft and other writers, past and present, with the Kurodahan series being introduced by Robert M. Price. The artwork, meanwhile, is very different in style to Yamada’s more recent output, to an extent that you wouldn’t connect these covers with his fantasy illustrations without seeing a credit.

I’ve long been curious about Japanese representations of the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft’s fiction has obvious attractions for the Japanese imagination but the art used by Japanese publishers doesn’t always travel overseas unless the artists themselves capture the attention of aficionados in other countries. ISFDB is a very useful resource but it’s still lacking when it comes to the listing of foreign editions. There’s more out there to be discovered.

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Weekend links 789

Niemand (1990) by Micha Ullman.

• The Diary of a Nobody (1964) by Ken Russell, John McGrath, Weedon Grossmith & George Grossmith. A recent posting at Play For Forever, an archive of hard-to-find/unreissued British TV drama.

• New music: Paul St. Hilaire With The Producers by Paul St. Hilaire; Atoms In The Void by Ivan the Tolerable & Hawksmoor; The Cosmic Tones Research Trio by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio.

• At Public Domain Review: Julie Park explores the history of the camera obscura.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Philosophy of Jazz by Daniel Martin Feige.

• At Unquiet Things: Jana Heidersdorf’s fairy tale subversions.

• At Colossal: Five decades of land art by Andy Goldsworthy.

• The Strange World of…Marissa Nadler.

• RIP Robert Wilson.

• Nobody (1968) by Larry Williams & Johnny Watson with Kaleidoscope | “There Is Nobody” (1976) by Brian Eno | Nobody (1978) by Ry Cooder

Weekend links 788

The Witches’ Flight (1798) by Francisco Goya.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews the latest book from Tartarus, a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa by R.B. Russell. You don’t hear much about Rampa today but, as Mark says, old copies of his books have for many years been common sights on the Spiritualism/Occult shelves of British bookshops. Rampa wasn’t a Tibetan monk as he claimed in his first book, The Third Eye, but a very non-Tibetan Englishman, Cyril Henry Hoskin, whose stories about his early years evolved following press investigations into a claim of being possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan doctor named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Hoskin maintained the Rampa persona for the rest of his life, writing many more books about the mystic East, as well as accounts of his contact with the planet Venus and his psychic connection with his Siamese cat. The Rampa books were very popular in the 1960s—my mother had three or four of them—despite continual accusations that their author was a fraud.

• New music: The Hadronic Seeress And Other Wyrd Tales by The Wyrding Module; Master Builder by Xeeland; Resurrection Of The Foghorns by Everyday Dust.

• The twelfth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Rivers of galaxies: Mark Neyrinck on the cosmic web and other metaphors that describe the largest structures in the Universe.

• “Curation becomes subservient to metrics.” Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Erica Ward presents Tokyo as a living, breathing organism.

• At the BFI: Chloe Walker chooses 10 great films by one-time directors.

• At Unquiet Things: How Yuko Shimizu rewires ancient stories.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Jana Thork.

• RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

• Web Weaver (1974) by Hawkwind | The Web (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire | Web (1992) by Brian Eno

Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art

Presenting a new book design, and a very substantial production. Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art is a two-volume slipcased collection of the late Bob Haberfield’s drawings, paintings and illustrations, dating from his youth in Australia to his retirement in Wales. As a commercial artist, Haberfield is best known for the many cover paintings he produced in the 1970s for fantasy, horror and SF books, especially those for the Michael Moorcock novels published in the UK by Mayflower. He continued to work as a cover illustrator in the 1980s but his career encompassed album cover design during the 1960s in Australia, advertising and product illustration in Australia and Britain, and a great deal of personal work, all of which is covered here. The books were commissioned by Bob’s son, Ben Haberfield, who contributes a personal reminiscence and biographical note; the books also feature a discussion of Bob’s art by an old friend, Garry Kinnane, along with shorter pieces and remembrances by Michael Moorcock, Rodney Matthews, Peter Meerman, John Guy Collick, and John Davey.

As for the artwork, this covers an extraordinary range of styles and media. The first volume, The Man, is Haberfield’s personal catalogue of his career, covering his days at art school in the 1960s to his years in Wales. The second volume, His Art, is the commercial work: book covers, record and magazine covers, and a large amount of product illustration for advertising, supermarkets and food companies. Haberfield was a versatile artist with a flair for imitation, something which helped his later illustrations for product packaging (biscuits, chocolates, etc) where he was often him to create paintings or drawings in very different styles. So too with his book covers, many of which have gone unidentified for years because the publishers didn’t give Haberfield a credit, while the artwork wasn’t easily identifiable as being Haberfield’s own. I’m pleased that we’ve been able to confirm that several uncredited Panther paperbacks are Haberfields.

Genre illustrators tend to fall into two camps: the first group enjoy doing the kinds of drawing or painting that they’re requested to do for cover commissions, and are happy to do more of the same when left alone. The second group approach cover work as a job and nothing more; when left to their own devices you find them painting landscapes or portraits or whatever. Bob Haberfield was definitely in the second category. He landed in London in 1968 just as Mayflower Books was scaling up its publishing with a line of books that included UK paperback debuts of Michael Moorcock novels. Haberfield’s covers immediately stood out from Mayflower’s other books of the period, most of which were unimpressive photographic productions. Moorcock’s career took off shortly after; the Mayflower books were reprinted in larger quantities, and for a several years those books and Haberfield’s Buddhist-themed paintings were unavoidable in British bookshops. The Moorcock covers only occupy a small percentage of the pages in this collection but for many people they’ll be the main point of interest. It wasn’t possible to present all of the original paintings, many of them having been lost over the years or sold to unknown private collectors. But the collection does include a complete gallery of Haberfield’s Moorcock cover art, along with covers and original paintings for Panther (mostly horror titles), Penguin and others.

My design for the collection is fairly restrained, the main concern having been the presentation of hundreds of individual pieces of artwork; there are 608 pages altogether, containing around 800 individual paintings and drawings. The headlines are set in various weights of Busorama, a font launched in 1970 which is a common sight in design from that decade. Putting this lot together involved considerable effort, especially on the part of co-editor/publisher John Davey. It’s good to see it out at last.

The books are published by Jayde Design and are available here. RRP is £52 which is a lot but pretty much the standard for a two-volume slipcased set. More page samples follow below. There’s also an early review by The Outlaw Bookseller at YouTube.

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British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day

The “to-day” in the title is a sign that this volume dates from the years before the Second World War when the hyphenated “today” was still a common sight. British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day was published in 1923, one of many such books produced by The Studio magazine. Studio editor Geoffrey Holme is also credited as editor of the book which follows the history of British illustration from Thomas Bewick, in 1795, to Randolph Schwabe in 1923, with each artist being represented by one or two pieces considered to exemplify their work. (Harry Clarke, who appears near the end, was Irish but the newly-minted Irish Free State was only a year old at this time so Clarke had technically been a Briton for most of his life.) Being a Studio publication, each illustration includes a note of the medium used (pen, wood engraving, etc), something you don’t always see in books of this kind. A lengthy introductory essay by Malcolm C. Salaman examines the work of each artist in turn. Two hundred pages isn’t anything like enough to do justice to the subject, and I could quibble over many of the selections, as well as the omissions. But the book is worthwhile for some of its unusual choices as well as showing drawings by artists who weren’t as well known as Beardsley and company. Among the unusual selections is the original drawing for The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar that Harry Clarke produced for his Poe collection. This was rejected by Harrap for being too horrible even though it accurately depicts the moments from the end of the story. The drawing is much more detailed than the one that replaced it but you don’t see the first version reproduced very often. Looking at it again it occurs to me that it really ought to be included in future editions of Clarke’s Poe illustrations.

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