{lovecraft} – Page 34 – { feuilleton }

New projects and new interview

The final post of an exceptionally productive year arrives with 2010 already shaping up to be just as busy and stimulating work-wise. In 2009 I designed at least 12 books (or was it 13? I’ve lost count…), 8 or 9 book covers, several CDs and many one-off commissions, as well as producing that calendar. If the precise details are vague it’s because the year has passed in something of a blur.

A number of the books I’ve been working on have yet to be published, among them The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer which will be appearing soon from Tachyon. This is a small hardback whose humorous nature should be self-explanatory but if you need further details, Jeff can tell you more. And one of the major tasks of next year will be work for another VanderProject, The Thackery T Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, a sequel to the acclaimed Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. The new anthology will be a HarperCollins title due for publication in 2011; once again, Jeff has further details.

Finally, the good people at Innsmouth Free Press talked to me recently and their interview is now posted. Given the nature of the site, the discussion mostly concerns matters Lovecraftian but I also talk a little about how I ended up doing all this stuff in the first place. And if you read to the end you’ll discover which Lovecraft character I’d prefer to be. I decided to stick with the human cast; choosing from among the Great Old Ones seems far too presumptuous, even for an inflated ego like mine.

More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos

Yes, it’s these again, and no, I’m not posting them because it Christmas (although you probably don’t believe that). This is the first opportunity I’ve had to add the designs to CafePress after letting them sit for a while seeing as they’re all still available on Modofly’s book range. I’ve had queries recently for the Steampunk designs as poster prints so these are now available in the usual CafePress sizes of large, small and mini. There’s also a range of CafePress t-shirts, and if you’d like one of those they have a bewilderingly extensive choice. The four pieces are:

• Steampunk | CafePress shop
• Steampunk Redux | CafePress shop
• Steampunk: Life in Our New Century! | CafePress shop
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos | CafePress shop

While we’re on the subject of Coulthart merchandise, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve discontinued selling signed prints for the time being so CafePress is now the sole place to get a print of anything. I’ve been so busy recently that keeping up with print orders was becoming a serious problem, in addition to never having been very lucrative in the first place. CafePress has excellent printing and can produce things at a large size a lot more cheaply than I’d be able to manage. This doesn’t rule out signed prints altogether but in future they’ll probably be strictly limited editions, signed and numbered. Any developments along those lines will be announced here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New Modofly books
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown DVD

It’s that thing again…

There’s much to loathe about this time of year—the short and dismal days whose appalling weather will persist until mid-March, the trees denuded at last of their leaves, the Chinese Water Torture of Xmas trivia—but the post this week at least brought some compensations. As well as the copies of Dodgem Logic there was a box of Penguin book cover postcards which I won in a Guardian Books giveaway, and also the long-awaited arrival of Frank Woodward’s documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown on DVD. I’ve mentioned this latter work before, of course, but I’ll repeat that it’s the best documentary to date concerning the life and career of HPL, and features several pieces of my own artwork as well as contributions from other fine Lovecraftian illustrators. Among the interviewees are Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Caitlin R Kiernan, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell and Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi. The DVD is only Region 1/NTSC at the moment, but is available also as a Blu-ray disc if you need to see the aforementioned in high-definition. The film runs for 90-minutes and the disc includes an additional 70-minutes of interviews, a Lovecraft art gallery and more. Essential viewing for all aficionados.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

More book covers

One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint of The Call of Cthulhu from Barnes & Noble.

While we’re on the subject—and book covers are never far away, as yesterday’s post demonstrates—I was asked to contribute to this week’s Mind Meld discussion at SF Signal, answering the question “Which are the most memorable book covers in science fiction and fantasy?” Some of the entries in my list have been discussed here in the past. Compared to the other responses I come across like I’m giving a lecture… And there was further sf cover discussion at io9 this week. Good to see older generations of artists and designers still receiving enthusiastic attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Science fiction and fantasy covers

Outer Alliance Pride Day

Today is Outer Alliance Pride Day so let’s begin with a statement:

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

Various members of the Outer Alliance are either posting fiction, or reviewing something or otherwise attempting to fill that declaration of intent. For my part I decided today to do a sketch based on my favourite chapter of The Ticket that Exploded by William Burroughs, the sequence entitled the black fruit which Burroughs wrote with Michael Portman. Ticket was the first Burroughs book I read at the age of 16 or so, having discovered a copy in a local library, and it really felt like something exploding in the head. For a start, the text is some of his least accommodating for an average reader, although I was already familiar enough with literary experiment to cope with that. Far more electrifying was seeing familiar scenarios from science fiction and fantasy infused with a raw and relentless gay sexuality of endless erections and spurting cocks. The black fruit begins with a science fiction scene of lost astronauts encountering alien fishboys intent on having sex; it then progresses through a series of descriptions which read like a pornographic rewriting of similar scenes from HP Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. In the opening pages of Ticket, Burroughs describes his book as “science fiction” but this was like no sf I’d read; I started to wish there was more like it. There are flashes of similar stuff in The Soft Machine (including an idea borrowed from Henry Kuttner) and elsewhere, and Cities of the Red Night is pretty much a full-on fantasy in its second half, but I’d still like to read more about the fishboys…

Fishboy and Astronaut (detail).

So here’s an explicitly erotic sketch based on the black fruit (click the picture for the full thing). This should have been a lot better but I’m out of practice drawing at the moment and I didn’t give myself enough time. The scene doesn’t really match the book either, and the astronaut figure is pretty crappy. Feeble excuses aside, Burroughs’ rotting swamp gardens with their marble statues of copulating boys deserve better. And where his fiction leads, I’m still hoping that more writers will follow, not by copying his obsessions but by being as fearless and honest in mining their own.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William S Burroughs: A Man Within
• The art of NoBeast