{comics} – { feuilleton }

Cthulhu’s new labyrinth

Here in The North the weather is slowly turning against the wearing of T-shirts outdoors but this week I’ve made a new shirt available based on an old design. The first Cthulhu Labyrinth came about when I was putting together pages for a Cthulhu calendar in 2012. In the end it didn’t get used for the calendar but the design stuck around even though I was never entirely satisfied with it. My recent work on the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark has had me going back through all my Lovecraft-related art which prompted me to finally rework the old design into a more satisfying appearance. I’ve come to think of this as a distillation of The Call of Cthulhu into a single graphic: the globe-spanning investigation leads inexorably to the monster sitting spider-like at the centre of its convoluted path. As before, other shirt designs are available, and I can prepare new shirts from old artwork on request.

And since I’ve mentioned the work-in-progress, I thought another progress report was in order. After spending spare moments over the past 18 months reworking pages for The Great Old Ones while also designing new page layouts I’m now fully immersed in the completion of The Dunwich Horror, and very pleased with the way the story is proceeding. I’m still having to work on this as a side project but I feel properly engaged with the story now that I’m working on new pages rather than redrawing parts of old ones. I’ve just finished drawing page 27 which brings the narrative up to the place where the story reveals its apocalyptic scope, when Dr Henry Armitage reads for the first time a portion of Wilbur Whateley’s decrypted diary. I’ve roughed out the next few pages which will bring the story to the beginning of part 9 where I’m hoping the drawing will go more quickly once I’m back in the wilds of Dunwich. The pace is kept to a crawl by my having to match all the fine shading I was doing in the 1980s but shading rural scenes is generally less time-consuming than shading detailed interiors like the one above. The long march to Sentinel Hill continues.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Father of Serpents
• The Black Goat
• Tsathoggua rising
• H.P.L.
• The return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos

BWS and REH

Since Barry Windsor-Smith was absent from the previous post (or there in spirit via the pages of The Studio) I thought I’d post a few of his prints from the mid-70s. As I said in the Snaps piece, Smith and co. set up The Studio in order to concentrate on art that was creator-owned and free of the constraints they were forced to work under in the comics field. This didn’t mean that they completely abandoned the subjects which had made them popular artists. Barry Smith’s work for his own Gorblimey Press oscillated between pastiches of the 19th-century artists he admired—mainly Alphonse Mucha and the Pre-Raphaelites—and characters from the stories of Robert E. Howard, Conan in particular.

Solomon Kane (1975).

Smith’s work with Roy Thomas on the first run of Marvel’s Conan comics had given him access to a large audience of comic readers. Not all of these would have wanted to buy (or been able to afford) the Gorblimey Press run of signed and numbered prints but it made sense for Smith to offer some continuation with the previous phase of his career. My animus towards the Marvel comics format means I have little affection for the Smith and Thomas Conan comics. But it’s interesting watching Smith’s work there evolve within the restrictions of the production-line system when you know he’ll end up presenting a very different version of Conan and Howard’s other characters in his prints.

Bran Mak Morn (1975).

Most of the pieces here are from the Gorblimey Robert E. Howard portfolio, a collection of five prints presenting portraits of characters from Howard’s stories. Smith included three of these—Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and Thoth Amon—in his section of The Studio.

Thoth Amon (1975).

Continue reading “BWS and REH”

Weekend links 833

Tony Hyde’s original artwork for the front cover of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind. The painting is being auctioned later this month.

• At the Daily Heller: Steven Heller reprints his 2012 Atlantic review of The Graphic Canon, a three-volume collection of visual adaptations of works of literature. The collection was edited by the late Russ Kick, and includes my own condensation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bill Hsu presents…21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations by Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña, Hugo Covarrubias, Christiane Cegavske, John Frame, Saori Shiroki, Joe Hsieh, Phil Tippett, Robert Morgan, Shengwei Zhou.

• At Colossal: In Los Angeles, 70 artists transform a vacant hospital into a sprawling art experience.

What we were doing was rooted in that specific moment, but looking back, it also seems to resonate strongly with the present—particularly in terms of how we understand media, perception, and reality itself. This is something I’ve been thinking about again recently, especially with the renewed activity around Cabaret Voltaire. It brings into focus the extent to which earlier work now reads almost as a form of prefiguration. At the time, though, much of it was intuitive. We didn’t necessarily have a fully formed theoretical framework for what we were doing—we were artists, and we were working instinctively. It’s really only in retrospect that some of those ideas begin to take on a clearer shape and meaning.

Stephen Mallinder talking to Nicolas Ballet about Cabaret Voltaire, the group’s history and working methods

• New music: The Endless Dance by Hannah Peel; Helt by Fjall; Air Signs by Anthéne.

• Adam Rowe is writing a new book about science fiction art.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Brutal Types.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 135 by Aspetuck.

• Brute Reason (1983) by Bernard Szajner | Let’s Get Brutal (1986) by Nitro Deluxe | Brutal But Clean (1994) by Cabaret Voltaire

Weekend links 828

Visitation (1976) by Gilbert Williams.

• “It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case.” Daniel Lavelle explores the Rendlesham Forest mystery of 1980, Britain’s own answer to the Roswell Incident. The case has more substantial documentation than most close encounters but it also has its share of conflicting reports, claims and interpretations. The truth is out there but it’s not evenly distributed.

• The Science of Spooky Sounds: Kristen French talks to researcher Rodney Schmaltz about his theory that infrasound may be responsible for the haunted feelings people experience in some buildings.

• New music: Six Organs of Admittance featuring The Six Organs Olive Choir by Six Organs of Admittance; Blue Loops by Kevin Richard Martin; Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt by Michael F. Hunt.

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller on The Complete Zap Comix, an expensive reprint of the pioneering underground title coming soon from Fantagraphics.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun edited by Amy Hale.

• At Colossal: Linocuts by Eduardo Robledo celebrate Mexican heritage and community.

• Object of the week at the BFI is Vic Fair’s poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth.

• The Strange World of…Hildur Guðnadóttir.

• Wide-band WebSDR in Enschede, NL

• Lights At Rendlesham (2012) by Time Columns | Rendlesham Forest (1980) (2019) by Grey Frequency | Lights Over Woodbridge (2021) by A Farewell To Hexes

Weekend links 823

“NASA’s Hubble revisits Crab Nebula to track 25 years of expansion.“

• Snakes and Ladders is a video adaptation of the one-off Moon and Serpent performance presented by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins at Conway Hall, London, in 1999. With visual samples from Eddie Campbell’s comic-strip adaptation of the audio recording, plus my artwork from the CD release. (Thanks to Francis for the tip!)

• The spring catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• New music: State Of Matter by Dobrawa Czocher; Plague Dogs by The Heartwood Institute.

• “Why we made a film about Mark Fisher called We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher.”

• At Colossal: “Ambiguity reigns in Olaf Hajek’s mysterious illustrations”.

• At Public Domain Review: Monet’s early caricatures (ca. late 1850s).

• At the BFI: George Orwell, film critic.

• The Strange World of…Ladytron.

• The Plague (1967) by Scott Walker | A Plague Of Angels (2007) by Earth | The Plague (2014) by Cosmic Ground