{magazines} – Page 20 – { feuilleton }

Barazoku covers

Barazoku (“The rose tribe”) wasn’t the first Japanese magazine for gay men but it was the first such title with a general circulation, as well as the longest running. 400 issues were published from 1971 to 2008. I wasn’t aware until I started reading about the history of this magazine that bara (“rose”) was originally a pejorative term like “pansy”. As with many slang terms, not least “gay”, the meaning and application has evolved over time. Use of “bara” today is confused by its application in the West to almost any form of gay manga that isn’t yaoi, a utilization that some Japanese artists take issue with.

For Western viewers, the most immediately striking thing about the covers of Barazoku is their reliance on drawings or paintings rather than photographs. This isn’t entirely unprecedented—Physique Pictorial and Fizeek in the US used drawn covers from time to time—but making artwork a consistent cover feature is very unusual. (The first few covers also feature extracts from the lyrics of Bridge Over Troubled Water…) Some of the men who provided covers or interior art have appeared here in the past, among them Ben Kimura, Go Mishima and Sadao Hasegawa. The covers signed “Rune” are the work of Rune Naito (1932–2007), an artist better known in Japan for having popularised the kawaii aesthetic with his drawings of large-eyed girls and panda bears.

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Frazetta and Poe

Art by Frank Frazetta, lettering by Gail Smith.

Frank Frazetta wasn’t an artist you’d usually associate with a literary master like Edgar Allan Poe. With the exception of an idiosyncratic Lord of the Rings portfolio most of the books that Frazetta illustrated were by Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs. The page above is from a series of drawings in issue 8 of Witzend magazine that accompany the text of Poe’s The City in the Sea. There’s no editorial comment to explain the origin of this piece but Frazetta’s drawings, which depict the sole survivor of a plane crash, look like they may have been intended for something else entirely, there’s no connection with the poem apart from the coastal setting. Witzend was an odd and interesting magazine that was founded by Wallace Wood to accommodate pieces like this one which might not have an outlet elsewhere. Frazetta had a drawing in the first issue in 1966; issue 8 appeared in 1972 by which time the magazine had a different publisher and editor but continued to feature work by Wood and his friends. The whole run is very worthwhile, even issue 9 which departed from the usual form to devote the entire number to the films of WC Fields.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frank Frazetta, 1928–2010
• Frazetta: Painting with Fire
• Fantastic art from Pan Books

The art of Mike Hinge, 1931–2003

Amazing Science Fiction, May 1972.

Back in March I ended my post on the psychedelia-derived art style that I think of as “the groovy look” with the words “there’s a lot more to be found.” There is indeed, and I’d neglected to include anything in the post by Mike Hinge, a New Zealand-born illustrator whose covers for American SF magazines in the 1970s brought a splash of vivid colour to the groove-deprived world of science fiction. This was a rather belated development for staid titles like Amazing and Analog whose covers in the previous decade wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Gernsback era. Opening the door to someone like Mike Hinge, a graphic designer as well as a general illustrator, was probably a result of both magazines having undergone recent changes of editorship. Hinge approached SF art in the same way that Jim Steranko approached comic-book art in the late 1960s, importing trends that had been flourishing outside the medium. (And Steranko liked Hinge’s art enough to publish a portfolio of black-and-white drawings, The Mike Hinge Experience, in 1973.) This kind of graphic style was increasingly outmoded by the mid-70s but some of Hinge’s compositions are audacious in context: the Algol cover with one of his robots seen in a water reflection (and those ripples that defy perspective), the Analog cover that works both vertically and horizontally.

For this post I’ve favoured Hinge’s groovy look over other covers, especially those from the late 70s when his cover art shifted to a painted style which is less distinctive, and less interesting as a result. It’s the distinctive style that people still prefer today. There’s more to be seen at Tenth Letter of the Alphabet and Onyx Cube.

Undated drawing (probably mid-60s).

Something else you can always find more of is Aubrey Beardsley borrowings. Via Tenth Letter of the Alphabet which has a couple more pieces in this style.

Wraparound cover for Witzend #6, Spring 1969.

Witzend was a magazine of comics, fantasy stories and related art published by Wallace Wood, a complete run of which may be found here.

Amazing Science Fiction, November 1970.

The Leaves of Time (1971).

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Ian Miller at Interzone

Issue 4, 1983.

Ian Miller was the art editor for the early issues of Interzone magazine, during which time several of his own drawings and paintings appeared as illustrations. Many of these haven’t been reprinted since, including three that are credited to an “Edwin Dorff”, a name I think we can take as a pseudonym. The run of Interzone at the Internet Archive is an incomplete one, unfortunately, some of the missing issues feature more Miller. Issue 34 contains Miller drawings throughout.

Issue 3, 1982.

Issue 4, 1983.

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Weekend links 566

The Amida Falls in the Far Reaches of the Kisokaido Road. From the series A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (c. 1832) by Hokusai.

• New music: In Love With A Ghost by Kevin Richard Martin (aka Kevin Martin, The Bug, etc), a preview from his forthcoming alternative score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). In other hands I’d probably dismiss a further addition to the trend of creating new scores for films that don’t require them. Tarkovsky’s film certainly doesn’t need any new music, and we’ve already had an album-length homage from Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason. But I like Martin’s sombre atmospherics so he gets a pass with this one.

• “[Pauline] Oliveros wrote a piece for the New York Times in 1970 titled And Don’t Call Them Lady Composers, focusing on the difficulties of women being noticed and taken seriously in her field. It’s still online and could have been written yesterday.” Jude Rogers on Sisters With Transistors, a documentary about women in electronic music. Madeleine Siedel interviewed Lisa Rovner, the film’s director. Watch the trailer.

• Submissions to the 16th number of Dada journal Maintenant will be open at the beginning of October, 2021, following an announcement of the theme of the new issue in September. All you would-be (or actual) Dadaists out there have the summer to plot your potential contributions.

Our reverence for originals takes an absurdly extreme form in the recent craze for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), where collectors and traders spend huge sums of money on unique ‘ownership’ of a digital artwork that anyone can download for free. Since there’s no such thing as the original of a digital file, the artist can now certify the file as the one and only ‘original copy’, and make a fortune. Time will tell whether this is a transient fad or a new way of establishing the feeling of a relationship to the mind of the digital artist.

But our reverence for originals isn’t universal. Treating the original as special and sacred is a Western attitude. In China and Japan, for example, it’s acceptable to create exact replicas, and these are valued as much as the original—especially because an ancient original might degrade over time, but a new replica will show us how the work looked originally. And, as mentioned, there are studios in China where artists are employed to create fakes. Perhaps our culture teaches us to respond to artworks by inferring the mind behind the art.

“Works of art compel our attention—but can they change us?” asks Ellen Winner

• “What Don basically did here is find a series of one or two bar riffs, or parts, that he liked, have me write them down, and then say, in essence, ‘make something out of this’.” John French (aka Drumbo) recalls the making of Trout Mask Replica.

• From 1988 (and relevant this week because I’m reading a Pynchon novel): Thomas Pynchon’s review of Love in the Time of Cholera.

• Andy Thomas on fusion legend Ryo Kawasaki, pioneer of the synth guitar.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Dimitri Kirsanoff Day.

• Gareth Jones’ favourite music.

• RIP Monte Hellman.

• The Sea Named “Solaris” (1978) by Tomita | Solaris (2014) by Docetism | Solaris Return (2019) by Jenzeits