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Zones on wheels

Zones (1983).

My thanks to Nigel Day for sending me the following photos of the rear end of a Lambretta scooter that he was recently asked to decorate with art based on my cover for Zones by Hawkwind. He’s done a marvellous job, and even improved a little on the colour gradations behind the hawk’s head which in my painting don’t evolve as smoothly as they should. Nigel trades under the name Harry’s Hotrod Shop; there’s a website here as well as pages under the same name at Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

As I’ve no doubt said before, the Zones sleeve is one of the few Hawkwind covers I don’t feel abjectly embarrassed by. The album was released in October 1983, and was my second cover for Hawkwind, following an album released the month before whose terrible artwork was something I sent to Dave Brock that I never intended to have used anywhere. The Zones art was something I’d created on spec the year before, shortly after what would have been my cover for the Church Of Hawkwind album was forced onto the album’s lyric book by an art director at RCA who hated the material he’d been given to work with. This wasn’t the only unpleasant incident from the group’s short tenure at RCA. Zones was released on Flicknife Records, an independent label that proved to be a much better home for the band.

A rare Japanese vinyl release.

The album itself is a pretty good collection of live recordings from 1980 to 1982, with highlights that include a Michael Moorcock song, Running Through The Backbrain, with Moorcock himself on vocal. This was an exclusive piece until the entire concert (Lewisham, 1980) was released as part of the Levitation box set in 2009. Zones also contains several songs featuring Nik Turner, from the brief period when he returned to the group he’d been expelled from in 1976. And there’s also another live version of Motorway City, a song that first appeared on the Live Seventy Nine album. Having always liked Motorway City I was pleased when the Zones version was released as a single that used another spec piece of mine as the cover art (see this post).

And a picture-disc.

As I said in the post about the single artwork, I was 18 when I did that drawing. I was only 20 when I painted the Zones cover. Imagine something you’d created when you were 20 years old continually turning up again decades later. It’s gratifying, of course, but it can also be disconcerting. People seem to like it anyway, which is more than can be said for some of my other album covers. The weather here is finally getting warmer; prepare for the summer with a Zones T-shirt!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Space is one trip: the Hawkwind takes off
• New Wave Strangeness: Hawkwind’s Calvert years
• Twinkle, twinkle little stars
• Motorway cities
• Reality you can rely on
• Silver machines
• Notes from the Underground
• Hawkwind: Days of the Underground
• The Chronicle of the Cursed Sleeve
• Rock shirts
• The Cosmic Grill
• Void City
• Hawk things
• The Sonic Assassins
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Snowbound by Bram Stoker

The artwork is mine; the cover design is by Lookatcia.

Presenting my latest book for Alma, the Spanish publisher for whom I’ve illustrated several classic novels and story collections. The new volume is my second Bram Stoker title after Dracula in 2018 which, for the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to it by its English title. Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party was a collection of connected stories first published in 1908, 11 years after Dracula had established Stoker’s reputation. I wouldn’t call Snowbound a bad book but if you’ve read Dracula or Stoker’s more popular short stories it’s a disappointment, with no supernatural content and little to recommend it elsewhere. The first episode introduces the framing device: a group of travelling players are marooned by heavy snow while travelling on a train through the wilds of Scotland. To pass a dark and freezing night the troupe entertain themselves by relating memorable anecdotes from their careers, anecdotes which I imagine Stoker either heard from others or experienced himself during his years working for actor-manager Henry Irving. In place of the spooky tales one might expect from such a premise we’re offered a succession of vaguely comic episodes mixed with more serious drama, with a couple of the pieces being related in very broad “Oirish” and Cockney accents. The Irish episode is especially bizarre considering that Stoker was Irish himself; it reads like the kind of thing you’d get from an English writer trotting out lazy stereotypes.

My endpapers design.

There are other flaws I could mention but I’ve undersold the book enough as it is. Snowbound has never received much attention in the past, it wasn’t even reprinted in English until 2000. In my previous books for Alma I utilised a style which combined collaged backgrounds with hand-drawn elements in order to create illustrations whose engraved appearance made them seem like products of the period in which the stories were written. More recently I’ve been moving away from this style but the success of the previous Alma editions, Frankenstein in particular, obliged me to maintain some continuity with the look I’d created for Dracula. As it turned out, several of the Snowbound illustrations are entirely hand-drawn, with engraving-like textures used in the shading. The biggest departure from the previous books is the addition of an extra ink colour to the artwork, an effect that was fun to play with when creating different lighting effects. As to the pictorial details, several of the anedotes take place in the United States, hence the presence of an American steam train with an elevated smokestack, the spelling of the word “theater” on a poster, and so on.

Having mentioned Frankenstein I ought to also mention the recent Polish edition of the novel which reprints my Alma illustrations. This is a large-format hardback from Materia, a pubisher who don’t seem to have a proper web presence outside those Meta plague sites that I never link to. The book is on sale anyway. Meanwhile, I’m currently working on another new book for Alma which will feature ten full-colour double-page illustrations. More about this later.

Continue reading “Snowbound by Bram Stoker”

The return of The Thing: Artbook

The most notable feature of the alien organism in John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” is its physical mutability, a quality memorably expressed in John Carpenter’s film adaptation of the story, The Thing. Fitting, then, that The Thing: Artbook is due to be republished later this year in a new edition which adds fresh material to the original volume. I was one of over 350 artists asked to create personal responses to Carpenter’s film in 2016, the results of which were published by Printed In Blood as a heavyweight, large-format hardback. The new book will divide the original into a more manageable two-volume paperback set to which a third volume of fresh material will be added, with all three volumes being contained in a slipcase. The third volume will also be available as a standalone book. Pre-orders may be placed here.

For the reprint there’s the possibility of original contributors doing a new piece, a tempting idea but not something I have the time for at the moment. Last month I started work on a new series of book illustrations which I need to concentrate on even though I wouldn’t mind doing something new based on the film. Before the book was published I guessed that many of the artists would be working variations on favourite scenes or characters, an accurate prediction as it turned out. My own contribution was an attempt to depict some of the moments we don’t see, when transformations are taking place offscreen, but I also had a more complicated, poster-style design in mind which I never managed to work out to my own satisfaction. For now the idea will have to remain frozen in the conceptual ice.

Before starting work on my own drawing I also read John W. Campbell’s story and looked for earlier depictions of his alien. One of the book covers that turned up was the Bantam paperback of Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation (above), a book with a better cover than the UK editions which recycled elements from the film posters. I couldn’t find an artist credit at the time but the cover art is by Jim Burns, a British illustrator best known for his depictions of spacecraft and futuristic technology. Looking for confirmation of his credit turned up a picture of the original painting which has a husky looking at the frozen alien. I can see why the art director wanted the dog removed—the cover is better with all the viewer’s attention drawn to those insectile legs—but Burns’ colour scheme is spoiled by the greenish tinge of the printed version. Ice is a difficult substance to paint well. If I was Burns I would have been a little annoyed that all those icy details had been lost.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Thing: Artbook
• The Thing Group Art Show
• Things

Tsathoggua rising

I said last week that I’d almost finished reworking my portrait of Tsathoggua for the Lovecraft book, and here it is. Tsathoggua first came into the world in a Hyperborea story by Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, before being incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by HP Lovecraft who refers to the god-creature in several of his stories. Where Smith describes a hideous toad-like being, Lovecraft avoids being too closely bound by material specifics, referring to an “amorphous” entity which suggests a range of possibilities for illustration. To be fair to Smith, there is an amorphous and very deadly creature lurking in the temple of Tsathoggua in The Tale of Satampra Zeiros but we never learn whether this is Tsathoggua itself or some other being.

The amorphousness of Lovecraftian entities is a factor which is too often ignored in the world of weird illustration. Cosmic horror thrives on the fluidity of physics and physical matter but many illustrators seem content to copy one another instead of inventing new teratisms, a process that results in the accretion of stereotypes. Cthulhu, as I’m always reminding people, explodes into pieces after being struck by a ship at the end of The Call of Cthulhu, the remnants then recombining when the ship sails away from the scene. Lovecraft never intended his “spawn from the stars” to resemble the accreted stereotype we see today, a kind of Jolly Green Giant with squid mask and bat wings, reaching a brawny and very human arm towards the viewer. The ultimate expression of cosmic amorphousness may be found in the Shoggoths, those alien entities whose default condition is a mass of shapeless, iridescent protoplasm.

It was the amorphous nature of Tsathoggua that I wanted to honour with my original Photoshop creation in 1999. The starting point was a photograph of a cephalopod (I forget now whether it was an octopus or a squid) torn from an old issue of National Geographic. My initial experiments with the picture weren’t intended to develop into Tsathoggua; I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I started but at some point during the production of The Great Old Ones I decided to turn the picture into Smith’s entity with the addition of a toad-like head. Rather than mould the rest of the picture into more recognisable organic shapes it was left in a largely amorphous state. The eye-like shape at the top is a complete mystery to me now, I can’t say why it was there but it felt right so there it stayed. Alan Moore’s text for Tsathoggua identifies the creature with the Kabbalistic sphere of Geburah, “Strength”, a zone imbued with the martial qualities of the planet Mars. This is one of the more arbitrary assignations in The Great Old Ones—there’s nothing especially warlike about the toad-god—but something had to occupy the space, and I’d already finished the picture before Alan started writing his pieces. For the new version I’ve redrawn some areas of the original, but most of the work has been a case of sharpening edges and improving the contrast and modelling. The spiky, crown-like upper half has been emphasised a little in order to complement the martial aspect. And the bulging, convex appearance of the original has been slightly enhanced, giving the impression that the creature’s gravitational mass is of a sufficient density to bend the light around it. None of this should be taken as a negation of Smith’s description of a squatting, pot-bellied toad-god. The icons of the Great Old Ones created by human beings are exactly this: human attempts to represent alien monstrosity. Some acolyte who happens to envision the real Tsathoggua might stammer that “It looked like…a giant toad!” thereby giving a form to the subsequent iconography. But the map is not the territory. Cthulhu doesn’t, and shouldn’t look like the statues either. The Jolly Green Giant needs to ditch the mask and wings and get back to selling canned vegetables.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• H.P.L.
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth

H.P.L.

It’s that man again. Presenting the latest reworked page from the ongoing reconstruction/improvement of my Haunter of the Dark book. The picture will illustrate “Abdul Alhazred”, the final section of Alan Moore’s text for The Great Old Ones in which HP Lovecraft is positioned at Malkuth, the “Kingdom” in Alan’s eldritch Kabbalah. This makes Lovecraft himself the receptive vessel of the energies descending from the spheres above, while paradoxically being the source of those energies. Or some of them at least… The Great Old Ones is a Mythos Kabbalah which features Dagon, Hastur, Tsathoggua and Yig as well as Cthulhu and the rest. Alan doesn’t subscribe to Kenneth Grant’s baseless theory that Lovecraft really was a receptacle for transmissions from interdimensional entities, but the incorporation of the writer into his own pantheon isn’t unprecedented. Abdul Alhazred was a childhood persona of Lovecraft’s before he assigned the name to the author of Al Azif, or the Necronomicon; further personas may be found in Through the Gates of the Silver Key (“Ward Phillips”), Robert Bloch’s The Suicide in the Study (“Luveh-Keraph, priest of Bast”), and other fictions.

HPL (1937) by Virgil Finlay.

Whether this literary sport warrants the apparently limitless production of Lovecraftian art featuring the man himself, usually sprouting or festooned with tentacles, is a debatable matter. Virgil Finlay began the fantastic portrait trend in 1937 with his memorial depiction of the author writing with a quill pen while dressed in 18th-century garb. The earliest example that I can think of showing Lovecraft paired with the ubiquitous tentacles was the Moebius cover for Lettres d’Arkham in 1975, although there may well be other drawings prior to this. I’ve often wondered what Lovecraft would have made of the deluge of publications and images derived from his work, especially those that place him inside the products of his imagination.

Cover art by Moebius, 1975.

And speaking of which… I was at a loss at first with how to approach a new Lovecraft portrait, all I knew was that one was necessary. The original Malkuth picture from 1999 is another poor Photoshop job which has nevertheless been reused elsewhere on a few occasions, even appearing in 2007 on the cover of an issue of FATE magazine. For the new version I started with the portrait itself, using white lines on black to copy the same portrait photograph that formed the centre of the older picture. This was then duplicated and flipped horizontally to create a kind of Janus head which gives the portrait a suitably weird quality without wreathing it in tentacles. The mirrored head harks back to a sequence of treated photos by JK Potter which I first saw in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special in 1979. Potter had used the same portrait photo to create effects that were somewhat compromised by poor reproduction, leading me to be believe that I’d created something slightly different to the first panel in his sequence. While researching this post I turned up an earlier version of the artwork which appeared on the back of the first issue of a US fanzine, Fantasy Mongers, also in 1979. The clearer reproduction revealed that the first head in Potter’s sequence is almost identical to my own. Ah well…

Photo art by JK Potter from the back cover of Fantasy Mongers #1, 1979.

The rest of the picture was improvised around this central image. Having drawn the portrait in white-on-black I decided to use a similar technique for the other elements. The Cthulhoid pillars are based on those in my Red-Night Rites painting from 1997, one of which appeared in the 1999 picture. The smaller figure on the right is from one of the photos that Wilfred Talman took while wandering the streets of New York with Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. This also appeared in the 1999 picture but for the new version I’ve emphasised what appears to be a book that Lovecraft is carrying in his right hand. Searching around for a complementary figure that might represent Abdul Alhazred turned up a 19th-century photo of a character who not only looked the part but is also standing in a manner similar to the Talman Lovecraft. If you look closely he’s also carrying a book, an addition of my own which turns him into the author of Al Azif. The polyhedra supporting the pair aren’t as arbitrary as they may seem. The spheres serve a dual purpose, preventing the figures from floating in space (or standing in water) while also relating to the Sephiroth of Malkuth which is identified with the Earth in the Kabbalistic scheme of planetary associations.

The next reworked picture will be Tsathoggua which is being polished rather than completely overhauled. I’m hoping I might have this done by the end of the month but I’m still chipping away at The Dunwich Horror while doing all this, as well as working on things which pay the bills. (I’ve just finished designing and illustrating another book.) Further progress will be announced in due course.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth