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More Druillet

I’ve been working all day to get multiple things finished before leaving for Providence so here’s a handful of Druillet covers pulled from Noosfere. Philippe Druillet must be one of the first artists—possibly the first—whose work is Lovecraftian at core. Artists had been illustrating Lovecraft’s stories since their first publication but Druillet’s work from the late 60s to the mid-70s often seems like a series of reports from Lovecraft’s imagination. This is most evident in two of the artist’s graphic novels, Yragaël (1974) and Urm le Fou (1975), which I find to be more convincingly Lovecraftian than much of the imitative fiction being produced at the time. For more along these lines, see this post about Druillet’s portfolio series, Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles.

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Weekend links 272

No Passing (1954) by Kay Sage.

• More Lovecraftiana: She Walks In Shadows, an illustrated all-woman Lovecraftian anthology, will be published in October. Related: “The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties“, a study that’s been filtering through the press as “Do octopuses have alien DNA?”

• “The right to ‘subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’ is the bedrock of an open, diverse society,” says Kenan Malik in his TB Davie Memorial Lecture.

• Sunn O))) with Attila Csihar at the Berlin Heimathafen. Related: Here’s what you missed at Sunn O)))’s sold out Berlin gig.

Caillois is fascinated by these “beveled buildings,” truly abundant in the Fifteenth, along with an unusually high incidence of blind walls, false façades, and merely ornamental windows, each beloved of his phantoms. In the parts of the arrondissement developed during the postwar period, Caillois’s attention is drawn instead to the ventilator shafts and drainage grates that dot the streets. These structures, built to clear away rainwater or aerate underground garages, have a secret function, according to him. Noting their uncanny similarity to some of the settings in the Weird Tales of HP Lovecraft, he speculates that they may have been constructed to provide the entry points for an extraterrestrial invasion of our planet.

Ryan Ruby on Roger Callois and the phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement

• “I’m really into big moments,” says Julia Holter whose new album, Have You In My Wilderness, is released next month.

• Adrian Utley talks to Peter Zinovieff, co-inventor of the EMS synthesizer. Related: What the Future Sounded Like.

• “Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the anti-2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Marissa Visci.

• Mix of the week: Gizehcast #17 by Rutger Zuydervelt.

• Modernist architecture on film.

• Thaumaturgy at Tumblr

• The Call of Ktulu (1984) by Metallica | Cthulhu Dawn (2000) by Cradle of Filth | Cthulhu: A Cryo Chamber Collaboration (2014) by Various Artists

HPL in France

Les Autres Dieux et autres nouvelles (2002).

In 2002, French publisher J’ai Lu used my perennially popular view of R’lyeh on the cover of a small collection of HP Lovecraft’s fiction. This replaced a Michael Whelan painting on an earlier edition which looks fine but which happens to be a detail from one of his old Elric covers.

Par-delà le mur du sommeil (2002). Cover art by Eikasia.

Looking through the Lovecraft pages at Noosfere this week turned up some recent French covers I’d not seen before. One of the striking things about cover art for French genre titles is the amount of artists who also work in comics. This isn’t so surprising given the scale of the French comics world but in the UK the tendency is for people to work in one area alone. Artists such as myself who move freely from comics to cover art to graphic design are a very small minority.

Night ocean et autres nouvelles (2005). Cover art by Richard Guérineau.

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The King in Green

Hastur (1999) by John Coulthart.

Going through some of my old Lovecraft art this week it occurred to me that this drawing hadn’t been made public in its original colour form. Hastur appears as a murkier black-and-white illustration in the Great Old Ones series I produced in collaboration with Alan Moore for The Haunter of the Dark. The drawing was one of several improvised pieces made using coloured pencils on tinted paper. Some people may regard this and similar works as “Gigeresque” but I only apply that label to close imitations of HR Giger’s biomechanical style. This type of improvised drawing or painting predates Giger—Max Ernst’s decalcomania paintings being familiar examples—and you see similar fields of organic or mineral forms in the work of other Surrealist or Fantastic artists. If you have some ability with a pencil or paintbrush it’s relatively easy to produce a lot of this kind of work; the challenge is to do something more than create a mass of writhing abstraction.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

The World of Wonders

This is the kind of Victorian book I enjoy a great deal, something that might be regarded as a Wunderkammer in paper form: not an encyclopedia, and not a science text-book but containing the kinds of articles you’d find in both. The chief attraction is the engraved illustrations, of course, although the articles themselves are often of interest. The World of Wonders dates from 1883, and is subtitled “A record of things wonderful in nature, science, and art”. This is very like a book I own entitled The Pictorial Cabinet of Marvels although The World of Wonders is the superior work, with a larger page count and a wider range of subjects. This is also only Volume 1, although I’ve not searched through the Internet Archive to see whether they have any further volumes. The illustrations are from a PDF, the page scans are much better quality. And I was pleased to find that two of the plates shown below—Barnacles and A Coal Forest—were combined by Wilfried Sätty for one of his Poe collages. (I’d scan the Sätty picture but I don’t want to spoil the book.) I’ve recently been commissioned to create some more engraving collages so volumes such as this may be useful source material.

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