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Du Tac au Tac: Druillet, Hogarth and Buscema

I thought I was done with Druillet for this week but no, there’s more. I hadn’t come across Du Tac au Tac before, a French TV show from the early 70s in which three (sometimes four) different comic artists are given a total of 15 minutes to improvise a drawing on a single board. The list of contributors is a who’s who of comic talent from France, Belgium, America and elsewhere. French TV site Ina.fr (which is pay-to-view) has 130 episodes in their archive, many of which have found their way onto YouTube. Druillet was a regular contributor, as was Moebius.

I’ve singled out this episode from 1972 for the astonishing conjunction of Druillet with Burne Hogarth, two artists with a considerable influence on my own comics work. Without the example of Heavy Metal magazine in general, and Druillet in particular, I might not have bothered trying to adapt Lovecraft’s stories into comics in the 1980s; at one point I was prepared to put together a book of stories-plus-illustrations along the lines of Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein. Burne Hogarth, meanwhile, casts a Tarzan-shaped shadow over the darker shadows of the Reverbstorm series, his work being quoted throughout, especially in the appropriation of the bizarre and sinister Ononoes from the Tarzan Sunday strips. The third artist present, John Buscema, is notable if only for representing the comics creation that I like the least: the over-muscled, flat-groined, stupidly-costumed, always-fighting, corporate superhero. As it is, Buscema doesn’t fare too well in this exchange, sketching a half-hearted Silver Surfer while Hogarth (who was left-handed; don’t think I knew that) draws a profile of Tarzan in pastels, and Druillet works furiously with markers to create a typical melange of bat-winged demon, alien glyph and screaming head. I’ve not watched any of the other episodes yet but for those interested there are two channels of the things here and here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sorcerer: Druillet and Friedkin
• Ô Sidarta: a film about Philippe Druillet
• Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles
• Heavy Metal, October 1979: the Lovecraft special
• Philippe Druillet album covers
• Druillet’s vampires
• Salammbô illustrated
• Druillet meets Hodgson

Ô Sidarta: a film about Philippe Druillet

“Qualité très médiocre,” says the uploader of this 10-minute film by Michel Jakar about French comic artist Phillipe Druillet but that’s okay with me when we’re given an opportunity to see Druillet at work in 1974. (Ô Sidarta, as Druillet-heads will tell you, is the name of Lone Sloane’s spaceship.) Jakar captured the saturnine artist on 35mm (!), accompanied by a buzzing electronic score from Alain Pierre; the drawing we see Druillet creating was later used on a poster when the film was being shown around festivals. Cut into the shots of the artist at work are pages and panels from the Lone Sloane story, Délirius (1973), and a later album, Yragaël (1974). Most fascinating for me was seeing Druillet flinging the ink and paint around at speed. This makes sense given the huge volume of pages he was producing in the 1970s, all of them crawling with detail and shading, but it’s still good to have suspicions confirmed.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles
• Heavy Metal, October 1979: the Lovecraft special
• Philippe Druillet album covers
• Druillet’s vampires
• Salammbô illustrated
• Druillet meets Hodgson

Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles

UK publisher Titan Books announced earlier this year that they’d be reprinting the first volume of Glénat’s excellent comic-strip adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels in an English edition, a book that should be out in September. This was a surprise to me when I’ve complained for years that Titan seldom showed any interest at all in Continental comics, despite France and Belgium being over-burdened by world-class creators. I’ve been surprised again this week by the news that Titan will also be reprinting the English edition of Philippe Druillet’s The Six Journeys of Lone Sloane in March next year. Druillet’s books have been unavailable in English editions for decades so this is good news indeed, even if the attention is scandalously late.

As I noted in the post about Glénat’s Elric, Druillet illustrated Moorcock’s albino anti-hero in 1973. The artist is better known for his Lovecraftian depictions, however, even when—as in the adventures of Lone Sloane—the story could easily sustain itself without all those sinister temples, fish people, Cyclopean architecture and the menace of nameless gods. The Lovecraft influence, which can be found in some of his earliest illustrations, comes to the fore in Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles, an HP Lovecraft story collection published in an expensive limited edition by Éditions Opta/André Sauret in 1976. Druillet provided ten colour illustrations plus a design for the boards. Some of these illustrations have since been used on paperback editions of Lovecraft in France, although many of them crop the artwork. Tentacles have become a perennial cliché in Lovecraftian art (I should know, I’ve drawn enough of them) so it’s worth noting how few there are in Druillet’s drawings.

Continue reading “Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles”

No tears for the creatures of the night

• No Tears (1978): A song and 12″ EP by Tuxedomoon. Sleeve design by Winston Tong.

• An artwork from 2005 by Will Munro.

• A make-up portfolio from 2012 by Belinda Betz. Photographer : Erwin Tirta. Model : Jesy Love. Make-Up Artist (Special Effects) : Belinda Betz.

• A badge design at Zazzle.

• A Pinterest page. Tags: dracula, isabelle adjani, vampires, werewolves, witchcraft, francisco goya, edward gorey, joanna lumley.

• A club night in St Gallen, Switzerland.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Blaine L. Reininger: An American Friend
• Tuxedomoon: some queer connections
• Made To Measure
• Subterranean Modern: The Residents, Chrome, MX-80 Sound and Tuxedomoon
• Tuxedomoon on La Edad de Oro, 1983
• Tuxedomoon designs by Patrick Roques
• Pink Narcissus: James Bidgood and Tuxedomoon

Weekend links 217

Le Petit Journal, June 16, 1912. Via Beautiful Century.

• Occult art by Nicomi Nix Turner, Daniel Martin Diaz, Amy Earles and William Crisafi. Related: Illustrations by Ernest M. Jessop for The Witches Frolic by Thomas Ingoldsby.

• “Our definition of ‘Industrial’ then was a very broad one, it’s definitely not so much now.” Chris Carter & Cosi Fanni Tutti on 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Throbbing Gristle.

• At Dangerous Minds: the Amok Assault Video (1988), an hour of the bizarre, the extreme and the outré which will probably get yanked from YouTube before too long.

I’ve always thought the exchange of words for money is no more and no less problematic than any other kind of prostitution—and it’s important that we prostitutes control a certain amount of our production (and reproduction, for that matter). If I’m writing a book and I’m warned, “Oh, this is unsaleable, you need to make it shorter,” or, “It has to be this, or that,” I’m proud to say I don’t pay attention.

Though this is becoming more difficult. As large publishers turn into monopolies, and the MBAs who are running them—maybe editors used to run them before—are steadily tightening the screws, they feel more and more that they get to call the shots.

Writers can do anything, says William T. Vollmann

• Mixes of the week: Over two hours of Coil and other artists sequenced by Surgeon, and Secret Thirteen Mix 122 by DJ Skirt.

• Alan Moore calls for a boycott of the “wretched” new Hercules film on behalf of his friend Steve Moore.

• Joe Orton‘s first play, Fred and Madge, will receive its world premier in September.

Ned Raggett found the drawing of mine that’s part of the Tentacles exhibition currently showing at the Monterey Aquarium, California. Thanks, Ned! There’s a sepia-toned version of the drawing in my Cthulhu calendar.

• “Weird is a wayward word,” says Erik Davis in an exploration of weirdness old and new.

• More details about the forthcoming Scott Walker + Sunn O))) collaboration.

• A trailer for a reissue of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

• A history of sex toys in pictures.

• Books on Book Covers

• Octopus’s Garden (1969) by The Beatles | The River (1970) by Octopus | Octopus (1970) by Syd Barrett