{fantasy} – Page 59 – { feuilleton }

Dream Boats and Other Stories by Dugald Stewart Walker

As is often the case, I keep intending to post various lengthy pieces but pressure of work is preventing that for the moment. So here’s another illustrated book courtesy of the Internet Archive. I linked to this in an earlier post about Walker’s work but hadn’t looked at all the illustrations until now. Dream Boats and Other Stories (1920), a collection of fairy tales, was written and illustrated by Walker, and while the prose is too twee for my jaded palette I do like his drawings. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.

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Ray Harryhausen, 1920–2013

Concept art for Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

He could also draw, something the obituaries won’t necessarily mention. I wasn’t aware of Ray Harryhausen’s many detailed preliminary drawings until I had the good fortune to see him give a talk at the Preston SF Group in the early 1990s. I recall mention being made of Gustave Doré as an influence, something that wasn’t so surprising given that Harryhausen’s animation career began with Willis O’Brien, animator of the original Kong. The Skull Island sets for King Kong owed much to Doré’s illustrations, and the film also made use of equally detailed preliminary drawings by O’Brien, Byron Crabbe and Mario Larrinaga.

I was going to link to Jason and company’s celebrated fight with the skeletons but the only clips on YouTube at the moment lack Bernard Herrmann’s superb score. The Harryhausen/Schneer films always had low budgets but the producers understood the importance of music, and employed Herrmann on four of their films: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island (1961) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Miklós Rózsa provided the score for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) so here’s a favourite moment from that film with John Philip Law and Martin Shaw tackling Tom Baker’s sword-wielding Kali statue.

Ray Harryhausen’s production drawings can be seen in The Art of Ray Harryhausen (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Swords against death

Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam

Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam is a forthcoming anthology in the Gay City Anthology series from Seattle’s Gay City Health Project and Minor Arcana Press. The publishers describe it as “a multidisciplinary anthology of amazing queer monster and ghost fiction, poetry and art.” I’ve created a cover design for the book, and also have a work-in-progress extract from the never-ending novel I’ve been immersed in since August 2006, a self-contained piece which I call Study in Blue, Green, and Gold. As the anthology title implies, the general (although not exclusive) tenor is spooky steampunk business with a queer inclination; my piece features copious quantities of sex, hallucinogenic drugs, steam locomotives and a fractal cat. Anyone wishing to know more is encouraged to give a push to the Kickstarter donation fund which has been launched to help with promotional costs. I’m very pleased to be involved with this, not least because some of the fiction I’ve been working on for over a decade will receive an airing. I’ve resolved recently to start pushing the writing side of things a bit more so this is a start. When the final anthology contents are announced next month I’ll post an update here.

The Web by Joan Ashworth

Another animated gem, The Web (1987) is an eighteen-minute film based on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels which dramatises the lethal duel between Flay and Swelter. Director Joan Ashworth reduces the cast to manservant, cook, and bedridden earl, no doubt for reasons of economy since the film was originally a student work. Economy or not, for me this has always captured more of the flavour of the books than the BBC’s well-intended but ultimately unsatisfying television adaptation. Watch The Web here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peake’s glassblowers
• Mervyn Peake in Coronation Street
• The Worlds of Mervyn Peake
• A profusion of Peake
• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs
• Peake’s Pan
• Buccaneers #1
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput
• The Illustrators of Alice

Rackham silhouettes

Another recent work-related discovery, this edition of the tale of Sleeping Beauty was published in 1920. The text is by CS Evans, and the book is illustrated throughout by Arthur Rackham who forgoes his usual ink-and-wash style in favour of silhouettes. Many of Rackham’s other books employ silhouettes, usually as vignettes at the ends of chapters, but this is the first book I’ve seen of his where the technique is applied to the book as a whole. The effect is stunning, with careful application of colour, and some very clever use of negative space. The combination of silhouettes with a fairy tale immediately brings to mind the animated films of Lotte Reiniger so it’s no surprise to find Rackham’s book being cited as an influence on both Reiniger and Fritz Lang. Browse the rest of the pages here or download the book here.

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