{horror} – Page 151 – { feuilleton }

The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

Mrs Amworth.

Another great artist of the macabre and supernatural, Virgil Finlay was the one of the most talented and imaginative illustrators of his generation. Unlike older contemporaries such as Joseph Leyendecker, who became wealthy producing elegant yet often bland advertising art, much of Finlay’s best work was for pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories which paid a pittance and printed his finely-hatched scratchboard drawings on the cheapest paper. The advantages to this work, such as they were, came in the access to a huge and appreciative audience, and the chance to provide the first illustrations for what would turn out to be classic genre stories. Finlay illustrated a number of HP Lovecraft’s tales and received the highest praise from the author in doing so. His illustration for Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep (below) contains a slight nod to Harry Clarke’s Valdemar picture (see previous post) with its distant, highlighted doorway, a detail that Clarke himself borrowed from the celebrated Las Meninas by Velázquez.

Therionweb has five galleries of Finlay’s pictures and Bud Plant again has a brief biography.

Abercrombie Station.

The Thing on the Doorstep.

Six and Ten.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

The Masque of the Red Death.

Halloween approaches so let’s consider the finest illustrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, Irish artist Harry Clarke. Aubrey Beardsley once declared “I am grotesque or I am nothing” yet even his grotesquery—which could be considerable—struggled to do justice to Poe. Clarke, the best of the post-Beardsley illustrators, found a perfect match in the Boston writer’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, his edition being published by Harrap in 1919. He could decorate fairy tales with the best of the great Edwardian book illustrators but a flair for the morbid blossomed when he found Poe. Only his later masterpiece, Goethe’s Faust, improved on the dark splendour of these drawings. “Never before have these marvellous tales been visually interpreted with such flesh-creeping, brain-tainting illusions of horror, terror and the unspeakable” wrote a critic in The Studio.

Lots more pictures at Grandma’s Graphics (although none of the colour plates, unfortunately) including many of the Faust drawings. Wikipedia has photos of some of Clarke’s incredible stained-glass windows, as does Bud Plant’s biography page.

Ligeia.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Ghost Box

Q: What do you get when you cross analogue synthesizers, samples from obscure public information films, the graphic design of Pelican Books, Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, CS Lewis, Hammer horror, the Wicker Man and the music from Oliver Postgate’s animated films for children?

A: the CD releases by artists on the Ghost Box label. Ghost Box describe themselves as “an independent music label for artists that find inspiration in library music albums, folklore, vintage electronics, and the school music room” which, if you’re familiar with the reference points, is exactly what you get. A rather wonderful blend it is too, some of the tracks on Belbury Poly’s The Willows (named after Algernon Blackwood’s stunning horror tale) are how I expected Stereolab to sound until I heard them and was rather disappointed.

Favourite of the Ghost Box releases I’ve heard to date is (perhaps inevitably) Ourobourindra by Eric Zann (the “artist” here is named after Lovecraft’s haunted musician from The Music of Erich Zann). The website description—”Eric Zann’s radios, oscillators and recordings conjure eldritch, echoing spaces and invoke the voices of the dead that whisper within them”—again is a pretty accurate summation of this atmospheric and sinister audio collage. “Sinister” is a term that can be applied to much of this music and the Ghost Box founders, Julian House and Jim Jupp, declare in a Wire feature this month that matters spectral are of particular concern, hence the label name. Ourobourindra works especially well in this regard, sounding like the product of someone working through a trauma caused by viewing the seance scene from Dracula AD 1972 at too young an age. This is one I’ll be playing on Halloween.

Ghost Box music can be purchased online here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin book covers
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• The music of the Wicker Man
• The Absolute Elsewhere

Reverbstorm

My discipline here has rather collapsed since returning from Paris. Lots of things that required sorting out and the distraction of a new computer is the excuse. Time for a new announcement, however. Now that The Haunter of the Dark is back in print, work has begun at the Savoy HQ on the eventual reprinting of my comics magnum opus, Reverbstorm. This was the 8-part Lord Horror series I was producing for Savoy with David Britton that sprang directly out of my Lovecraft comics work and is, in some small way, a continuation of it (hence the inclusion of some pages in the final part of HOTD).

Reverbstorm was an attempt by Dave and I to produce a graphic novel (wretched term, but if the boot fits…) that was truly adult, at a time—the early Nineties—when much there was much discussion of “adult comics” but little worthy of the name being produced. Reverbstorm is adult in terms of its often aggressive and challenging content; so are many mainstream comics now. But it’s also adult in terms of style and technique, being laden with quotation and literary and artistic allusion that requires an understanding of some of the key works of the Modernist movement to fully appreciate. Being a Lord Horror work, there’s also plenty of reference to the fascist philosophy that Dave’s character (based on William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw) subscribes to. Mix all this with a great deal of violence and you have a very dark work indeed, one that most readers and reviewers of the time were happy to ignore.

Well Reverbstorm is returning to the world in a definitive form. All the artwork is being scanned and cleaned (and in some cases, amended slightly); the eighth and final part will see its first publication in this new edition and there’ll be some previously unseen or unpublished material also. The series as a whole contains 270 pages of some of my best ever black and white artwork (and some great additional work from Kris Guidio) so I’m very pleased that this volume is set to appear in a form that will do justice to the years we spent creating it. Publication will probably be in autumn 2007 but watch this space for further details.

For more on the Reverbstorm series, read my short essay about its genesis here.

Hail, horrors! hail, infernal world!

This marvellously lurid 250pp tome turned up in the post today, something I was looking forward to seeing as I wrote 30 of the reviews within, as well as some longer essays on Dracula, Lovecraft and a brief history of occult cinema. Nice layout, lots of colour and some great photos, many of which I haven’t seen elsewhere which isn’t always the case with books like this; I’ll enjoy reading the rest of it. Not sure when it’s due for publication just yet as Andre Deutsch/Carlton Books’ web presence is sketchy to say the least.

Update: The book was published on October 2nd, 2006.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The music of The Wicker Man
• Nosferatu
• David Rudkin on Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr