{books} – Page 297 – { feuilleton }

Pamela Colman Smith’s Annancy Stories

Pamela Colman Smith’s work has appeared here before but this is an example of her early illustration I hadn’t seen until now. Annancy Stories (1899) was written and illustrated by Smith, being her own presentation of the Jamaican versions of the Anansi trickster stories. Smith’s mother was Jamaican, and the family lived in Kingston for some years before moving to New York. She was only 20 when she produced this book which is illustrated throughout with full-page plates and smaller drawings. The text is in a Jamaican patois which, as the introduction notes, would have reminded American readers of the Brer Rabbit stories. There is, of course, a shared lineage there that goes back to Africa. The drawings are in a sketchier style than the marvellous Tarot designs Smith produced for the Rider-Waite deck nearly a decade later but you can see in them the origins of her late Art Nouveau style, and also that distinctive monogram in the corner of each drawing. Annacy Stories may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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Reverbstorm at Supervert

Keith Seward’s Horror Panegyric was a concise examination of David Britton’s multimedia Lord Horror project which Savoy Books published in 2007. I designed the book, the cover of which was my Arcimboldo pastiche of Lord Horror’s profile which appeared on the cover of issue 3 of Reverbstorm. The Supervert site which hosts an online copy of Horror Panegyric has this month posted my answers to some questions about Reverbstorm, the series having grown out of the first Lord Horror novel and the earlier comics:

The graphics in Reverbstorm sometimes seem more narrative than the words. How did you and David work out a scenario?

I don’t have objections per se to the usual story structures but in this series we both wanted to create something that wasn’t following familiar adventure narrative lines. The precedents for me were the European comic artists from Métal Hurlant who often favoured art over story; also Burne Hogarth whose work was a great influence on the style I used to draw Lord Horror. Hogarth’s Tarzan strips are adventure narratives but in his later books it’s the art that’s paramount. James Joyce is one of the characters in Reverbstorm, and you can also find a precedent in Ulysses where the story is overwhelmed by the surface detail.

Reverbstorm began with Paul Temple’s lyrics for the Reverbstorm song and a brief Lord Horror film treatment that Dave and Mike had put together for a production company. I don’t recall much about the treatment — I only looked at it once in the office — but it concerned Horror and Jessie Matthews in New York City, opening with a sequence where his Lordship kills some policemen in an alleyway. That vague outline can be seen in the first few pages of Reverbstorm with NYC changed to Torenbürgen. Other elements taken from the film treatment included the name Blue Blaze Laudanum — the actual robotic character came later — and the Souls which likewise became more substantially developed as the comic progressed.

Once we’d introduced all the characters things developed along thematic lines rather than strictly narrative ones. So the second part introduces the Ether Jumpers, the third part has the Apes, the fourth part the Ononoes, the fifth part Picasso and T.S. Eliot, and so on. Musical structure is an obvious parallel, and I consider some of the recurring background material to be visual leifmotifs which can indicate or imply one of the three main characters even if they aren’t present on the page. This musical analogy is an important one for appreciating the series as a whole. The entwined themes and references work in a manner that’s a lot closer to musical works than to the mechanics of an adventure narrative. (more)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Reverbstorm in print
• Reverbstorm update
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• A Reverbstorm jukebox
• Reverbstorm: Bauhaus Horror
• Reverbstorm: an introduction and preview

Weekend links 150

One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne.

• Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs.

• “Witches have a fashion moment,” says the NYT. Nice clothes but the writing trots out too many of the usual lazy clichés. Related: A Tale of Witches, Woodland and Half-remembered Melodies…, a new mix by Melmoth the Wanderer.

• Calidostópia! is a free album (FLAC & mp3) from Marcus Popp aka Oval: “an enticing 16-track collaboration…with seven wonderful singers/musicians from all over South America”.

Before meeting Moorcock in person, [Hari] Kunzru went on to say, ‘I didn’t realise the role he’d played in connecting so many different scenes and undergrounds together – the psychedelic music scene, the science fiction scene, the hip experimental literature scene around people like William Burroughs, pop art’.

Brave New Worlds: A Michael Moorcock Retrospective by Carol Huston. Moorcock’s Elric novels will be published by Glénat in new bande dessinée adaptations later this year.

• More art by Michael W. Kaluta at The Golden Age. And more fantastic comics/illustration by Philippe Caza at 50 Watts. There’s more Caza here.

• Mine and David Britton’s new book, Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, was reviewed at The Spectator.

• Google Street Scene: “Moments of cinema captured by Google Street View cameras”.

• Cosmic Sentinels and Spiral Jetties: JG Ballard, Robert Smithson & Tacita Dean

• Strange Flowers showcases the heads of Pavel Tchelitchew, 1949–1952.

• Setting in the East: Diamanda Galás on Women and Real Horror

• Little Joe: “A magazine about queers and cinema, mostly.”

• Nanoparticles loaded with bee venom kill HIV.

• Treatises on Dust: Antic Found Texts

• The Wizard Blew His Horn (1975) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock) | Brothel In Rosenstrasse (1982) by Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix | Running Through The Back Brain (1983) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock)

MMM

Post number three thousand, and searching the memory for anything which might be filed under MMM led to more occult art. Moina MacGregor Mathers (1865–1928) was the wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s. Moina was the sister of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and later took to signing her illustration work “M. Bergson MacGregor”. The illustration above, however, a frontispiece for her husband’s translation of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1897) was signed “M.M.M.” (The signature has been removed in this reproduction but is visible here.) That triplet of initials is typical of western occultism; when Aleister Crowley (no friend of the Mathers) was appointed head of the O.T.O. in Britain his new lodge was named Mysteria Mystica Maxima, or M.M.M.

Ms Mathers wasn’t the greatest of artists but her few works have a fin de siècle charm, and are informed by occult study which she and her husband took seriously. The example below is from yet another slim volume of mystical poetry, Poems (1897) by Golden Dawn adept Charles Rosher. No need to wonder why Max Beerbohm made Enoch Soames a poet; it often seems that those who weren’t writing poetry in the 1890s were in the minority.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Whirlpools
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism

Whirlpools

This was a surprise. My first thought on seeing the cover for Ethel Archer’s “book of verse”, The Whirlpool, was that its swirling waters were borrowed from Harry Clarke’s typically astonishing illustration for A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe. The problem there is that the Ethel Archer book was published in 1911 while Clarke’s first collection of Poe illustrations didn’t appear until 1919. The cover for the Archer book was by Ethel’s husband, Eugene Wieland, the publisher of Aleister Crowley’s Equinox periodical/occult treatise, and also the publisher of this volume. Crowley provided an introduction to the book. Given these occult associations it’s possible that Harry Clarke might have seen a copy of this. Clarke’s work appeared in Austin Spare’s own occult periodical, The Golden Hind, and he wasn’t averse to producing occult art of his own. This isn’t to say that Clarke necessarily took anything from the Archer book—sometimes a whirlpool is just a whirlpool—but it’s not outside the bounds of possibility.

There’s a copy of Ethel Archer’s book currently on sale at eBay, together with some original drawings by Eugene Wieland. The cover above came via John Eggeling’s Flickr page of rare book covers. The Poe illustration is via 50 Watts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism