{design} – { feuilleton }

Mug-wump Specific

Mugwump (mŭg´ wŭmp). An Algonquin word meaning a chief; in Eliot’s Indian Bible the word “centurion” in the Acts is rendered mugwump. It is now applied in the United States to independent members of the Republican party, those who refuse to follow the dictum of a caucus, and all political Pharisees whose party vote cannot be relied on. —Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1954

Such is the usual explanation given for the origin of the word “mugwump”, a term better known today, of course, for its use in Naked Lunch, and that mainly via David Cronenberg’s feature film. Why William Burroughs came to name his sinister creatures mugwumps is something I’ve never seen an explanation for although one may well exist somewhere.

A few years ago I wrote a short post showing how the first description of the mugwumps in Naked Lunch was a kind of science-fictional rewrite of a similar passage from Junkie, a description a predatory character that a drug-user might encounter in the narcotic underworld of the 1940s. As an addendum to the post I added a crude image of a label for a 19th-century patent medicine, “Mug-wump Specific”, which had turned up at Wikipedia without any attendant information. At first sight the label seemed too good to be true in its Burroughsian combination of the mugwump name, sexual disease and—since it claims to be a cure—Dr Benway-style crank medicine. These associations were further compounded by the Freudian illustration of a woman offering a bowl to a very large snake. (The latter detail shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a reference to snake oil, however. The snake twined around a staff is a common medical symbol, derived from Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine.) Why a medicine manufacturer in Indiana should choose mugwump as the name for its alleged cure is yet another mystery, and one unlikely to be resolved. I’d guess it’s a result of the impulse that still prevails today when new products have to be named in a distinctive manner that’s both memorable and copyrightable.

This mass of conundrums was percolating through my mind last week as a result of which I embarked on a fairly determined search to find the image above, a first-generation printing of the medicine label affixed to a US trademark application. Ever since the cruder image had turned up at Wikipedia I’d been wondering why there wasn’t a better copy to be found anywhere. Surely something with so many cultural connections should be flying around the Tumblr labyrinth by now? I’d previously tried all the obvious sources like the image section of the Wellcome collection, where you’ll find a variety of medicine labels, as well as the product catalogues at the Internet Archive. Since Google has taken to ruining its search engine it’s become increasingly difficult to find uncommon images but I was lucky on this occasion when I found one of the trademark applications for sale at eBay. Knowing that the Library of Congress has an online archive of such things I zipped over there and immediately found the sample above. I’ve since seen the same image plastered with proprietorial watermarks at Etsy where someone is selling reproductions. This happens a lot in print-on-demand circles and at image-resellers like Alamy where ownership is claimed over material which is demonstrably in the public domain. Well, if you’re desperate to own a “Mug-wump Specific” T-shirt or poster you can save yourself some money by downloading a high-resolution tiff of the label here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Lovecraft’s Brood

It’s that man again, or some of his progeny, infecting the world with their nightmares. Lovecraft’s Brood is a story collection edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of follow-up to Lovecraft’s Monsters, although the new book is a more expansive take on the Lovecraftian weird tale. As with the earlier collection, I designed and illustrated this one throughout. The illustrations were more of a challenge this time since the stories weren’t always focused on explicitly physical threats; or if they were, the threats remained either unseen or inexplicable. That can be good sometimes—there’s a tendency in horror illustration to always go for monster portraits or spoilerish scenes from the end of the story—but it doesn’t make the artist’s task an easy one. For a few of the pictures I used a minor detail; in the case of Mister Ainsley, for example, there’s a mention of taxidermy experiments which is what I chose to focus on. What “Mister Ainsley” looks like (or actually is) is never described as such, the reader’s imagination is left to fill the gaps in the story.

Among the other pictures there’s my first ever drawing of the real church that gave Lovecraft his model for the home of The Starry Wisdom cult in The Haunter of the Dark. This church, or its fictional counterpart, has haunted my imagination for a long time, being the subject of my first Lovecraft illustration in 1979 and (of course) the subject of my first Lovecraft comic strip in 1986. In Lovecraft’s Brood the church appears in The Beholder’s Share, another fine riff on Lovecraft’s fiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan in which the Starry Wisdom cult actually existed, with the old Catholic church on Federal Hill being the centre of their operations. The real church was demolished in 1992 but the location is still easy to find since the grounds have been turned into a small recreational area which retains the walls that surrounded the building. When I was in Providence in 2015 I walked over to Federal Hill to see a concert performance in a converted cinema but I didn’t manage to visit the site of the church, something I now regret.

On the technical side, this set of illustrations is the first where I’ve used Glitch Lab in the creation of some of the artwork. Glitch Lab is one of several tablet-based image-processing apps made by Ilixa that function like Photoshop’s filters but with many more options. Photoshop hasn’t done much with its basic suite of filters since the 1990s, something that doesn’t bother me most of the time but every so often you find yourself wanting to imitate a technical effect that can’t easily be achieved without a lot of work. For two of these illustrations I wanted views seen through different kinds of monitors, the first a low-quality TV screen of a type you’d see in a supermarket, then a distorted image from a malfunctioning camera whose output is being viewed on a computer monitor. Glitch Lab specialises in this kind of technical distortion, and can imitate a wide range of visual glitches of a type generated by old TV sets. The Note is the story with the security camera for which I painted a relatively minimal greyscale scene. This wouldn’t have worked on its own but running it through the filters gave it the required appearance. Wind Come Down the Mountain is much more heavily processed, and could have been pushed a lot further but I’d already destroyed a lot of the detail I’d put into the picture.

Lovecraft’s Brood is out now in print and digital from Tachyon and all the usual outlets.

Once Seen by Conrad Williams.

Mister Ainsley by Steve Rasnic Tem.

Continue reading “Lovecraft’s Brood”

Stone Elegy

A new piece of work which I completed recently, this is a poster for a short film, Stone Elegy, written and directed by Shane Smith. The film is a drama set in Ireland during the Iron Age, with a narrative that encompasses lost love, armed conflict and a touch of magic. The brief from Thin Veil Pictures was for something in the style of the cover I created for Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, a window-like frame of multiple panels in which various figures and details from the story could be seen. The Moore cover is very hard-edged and brightly coloured, going deliberately for a stained-glass window effect. The director and producer liked the formal frame but wanted the look of the poster to be darker, softer and more diffuse which has led to my doing this in a much more painterly style than I’d normally use. I’m very pleased with the results (as are the film-makers), in part because achieving this look with digital tools is no longer the chore I’ve felt it to be in the past. This has been achieved by a great deal of trial and error over the past few years, fine-tuning a small range of digital brushes that now behave in the ways I’d want a regular paintbrush to behave. One thing you never want when drawing or painting is to feel that the tools are getting in your your way.

Stone Elegy was a crowd-funded project so the poster is being used in part as a reward for the backers of the film. The print version will have the credits running at the foot of the poster. There’s a teaser for the film here (actually a self-contained piece), and a proper trailer here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore

Weekend links 835

Kites of Fukuroi and Distant View of Akiba in Totomi Province, from the series One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (1859) by Utagawa Hiroshige II.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: International Freak: Robin Farquharson and the Dream of Psychedelic Revolt by M. Syd Rosen.

• At the Daily Heller: the Brooklyn Botanical Garden looks back at the psychedelic Sixties with Flower Power.

• At the BFI: Sophia Satchell-Baeza selects 10 great queer American underground features of the 1970s.

• At Colossal: “Surreal Figures Step from Leonora Carrington’s Paintings into Shape of Dreams”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Surreal Paperback Visions of Richard Powers.

• The Reinvention of the Guitar in 13 Albums by Simon Reynolds.

• At Public Domain Review: The Art of Kite Flying (1430–1929).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2026 at Ambientblog.

• New music: Cloud Machines by Berndt / Schmidt.

• Kites (1967) by Simon Dupree And The Big Sound | Kites I (1999) by Brian Eno | Nuclear Kites (2023) by Hawksmoor

The art of Atelier Heinrichs & Bachmann

Who were Heinrichs and Bachmann? That’s a good question because neither I nor anyone else who’s written about their book covers can offer any more information beyond their names and the dates when they were active. What we do know is that from the mid-60s to an unspecified point in the 1970s Heinrichs and Bachmann’s studio was credited with many cover designs for books published by Heyne in Germany. By the 1980s the studio was still working for Heyne but with a credit now changed to Atelier Heinrichs & Schutz.

The designs featured here date from 1969 to 1971, and are part of a longer run of Heinrichs & Bachmann covers for science fiction titles published from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. I’d run across a few of these in the past but hadn’t gone looking for more until this weekend. I always enjoy seeing unusual approaches to SF illustration, and I especially enjoy anything which adopts this kind of post-psychedelic Pop-collage style. The influence of Heinz Edelmann’s art is evident in places, in particular the Edelmann look as it was filtered through the artists who worked on the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine. The Frank Herbert cover above could easily be added to the Sea of Heads. Also evident are faces that look as though they’ve been lifted from film stills. I’d guess that most of the figures in these collages were clipped from magazine pages then run through a photocopier once or twice to give that posterised effect.

Continue reading “The art of Atelier Heinrichs & Bachmann”