{magazines} – Page 73 – { feuilleton }

Salon Futura #1

It’s been a pleasure this week seeing my 1999 portrait of Cthulhu’s rotting domicile, R’lyeh, used as the cover image for Salon Futura, a new online magazine edited by Cheryl Morgan. Cheryl describes SF as “a new and hopefully somewhat different magazine devoted to the discussion of science fiction, fantasy and other forms of speculative literature.” Among the contents there’s a podcast interview with Gary K Wolfe, Nnedi Okorafor and Fábio Fernandes (the latter is a contributor to the steampunk book I’m currently designing for Tachyon); there are video interviews with writers Lauren Beukes and China Miéville, and the Guardian‘s Sam Jordison writes an appraisal of EL Doctorow’s 1994 novel The Waterworks (about New York City’s minatory Croton Reservoir) which stimulated my interest enough to make me want to search out the book. And speaking of minatory architecture, {feuilleton} approves of the presence of Taschen’s fat volume of Piranesi works spied on China Miéville’s bookshelf. China always has interesting things to say; go and see for yourself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le horreur cosmique

Owen Wood’s Zodiac

Yesterday’s zodiacal illustrations reminded me of this grubby item (depicting the twelve houses of the zodiac and four elements) which I took the trouble to scan since there’s no other example of it on the web. (Click for a larger version.) The artist, Owen Wood, was a highly-regarded illustrator commissioned to produce a poster in 1969 for the landmark magazine Man, Myth & Magic which was serialised weekly in the UK the following year. MMM had a few other giveaways in their early issues but Wood’s poster was by far the best piece. I thought I might have another copy somewhere but it didn’t turn up in a cursory search; if I find it I’ll replace this one. Wood’s very fine and intricate line-drawing deserves better appraisal than this dishevelled item which suffered from being pinned in too many smoke-filled rooms over the years. This obituary of the artist has details of his career.

Fire (detail).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Palladini’s Zodiac
• Austin Osman Spare

Gekko Hayashi: homoerotics and monsters

gekko1

Needless to say, it’s primarily the homoerotics which concern us here. Gekko Hayashi is the name under which Japanese artist Goji Ishihara (1923–1997) produced his gay erotica, and these examples are among a small handful to be found on the web. Far more common is his Ishihara work which included some spectacular grotesqueries for the Illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters (1972) and the Illustrated Book of Hell (1975). Sate your appetite for the monstrous at Pink Tentacle.

gekko2

Hayashi/Ishihara’s work may be scarce but you can read about both his personas thanks to ComiPress, who posted an overview of the artist’s career, and Comics212, who examined the gay side of his output. There is a book collection of Hayashi’s gay art but that appears to be out-of-print. This Japanese page has many samples from the Ishihara work.

The dual career of Hayashi/Ishihara brings to mind another artist equally adept at commercial illustration and gay art, Oliver Frey. As “Zack”, Frey gained an enthusiastic audience in UK gay mags while he was also popular with quite a different audience for his illustrations in computer game magazines throughout the 1980s. He was also no slouch at painting monsters as I recall. A collection of Zack comic strips, Bike Boy, is published this month by Bruno Gmünder.

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The Golden Book

top left: Gordon Ertz; top right: George M Richards.
bottom left: Constance Wheeler; bottom right: Boris Artzybasheff.

Covers from an American adventure story magazine which ran from 1925–1935. Very lavish designs compared to the pulps it was competing against. From the excellent selection at MagazineArt.org.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965

The art of Gilles Rimbault

The relaxing of constraints in the 1960s produced a breed of artist which hardly seems to exist any more, invariably male and equally at home illustrating generic fantasy as producing delicately-rendered and frequently weird erotica. French artist Gilles Rimbault is one such, as was British underground artist Jim Leon, and another Frenchman, Raymond Bertrand. Unlike Leon and Bertrand, Rimbault’s work and information about the artist is frustratingly scarce. The first examples here are from covers of French science fiction magazines—also a source of work for Bertrand—while the samples below are a pair of intriguingly androgynous pieces of erotica from this page which gathers a number of similar Hans Bellmer-like works. If anyone turns up more of Rimbault’s drawings, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002
• The art of Sibylle Ruppert
• The art of Bertrand