{work} – Page 41 – { feuilleton }

Things to Come

Things to Come is a science fiction-themed art exhibition opening this week at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel. Among the works on display there will be a large print of the fish-shaped dirigible that I created for Jeff VanderMeer and SJ Chambers, editors of The Steampunk Bible, back in 2010. After publication I reworked the picture slightly, adding a frame and trying out various tints, the idea being to produce a large version for print sales. I still haven’t got round to making prints available but I did let the museum have a copy of the framed version so its appearance at Petach Tikva is a first.

My thanks to Doreet LeVitte Harten for selecting this piece, and to Avshalom Suliman for dealing with the printing and other details. The exhibition runs to 20th August, 2016.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk in the Tank

Leather Cthulhu

A couple of the projects I’ve been working on for the past few months have yet to be made public but this one from last September has finally shambled into the light of day. The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales is a collection of 23 weird tales by HP Lovecraft (some of which are his collaborations with other writers) published by Barnes & Noble in their leatherbound Collectible Editions series. Anyone who’s held one of these volumes will know that they deserve to be called tomes rather than mere books; they’re heavy and lavishly produced, with detailed designs embossed on the front and back boards in a variety of metallic inks.

One of my drawings was used a few years ago inside the big B&N edition of Lovecraft’s collected fiction; more recently I also designed a cover for a B&N paperback edition of the Cthulhu Mythos tales but the brief on that occasion was for something quick using pre-existing artwork. Given that the Mythos stories are my favourites in Lovecraft’s oeuvre I would have preferred to have done something more elaborate so I was very pleased when asked last year to create a new design for this hardback edition. The design on the front panel presented some challenges as I didn’t want to have an isolated head with wings but I also didn’t want to reduce the Cthulhu figure to such an extent that detail would be compromised. (This type of embossed printing imposes a limit on the amount of detail you can put into the design.) The compromise was a frontal view of what I consider to be another Cthulhu Sphinx, after the more elaborate sculpted design in my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu. I find myself wondering now how this creature might look from the side.

The photos of the boards are courtesy of Betsy Beier at Barnes & Noble, and they show how much more effective the printed design is when you have the light reflecting on it. I’m now eagerly awaiting the arrival of a physical copy. The book will be out at the end of the month, and among the extra features there’s an introduction by Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi, my drawing of R’lyeh on the endpapers, and (if that wasn’t enough) a poster reproduction of my Cthulhu Rising picture.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Futurismo!

It’s good to finally have some new work posted on the front page of this website. I’ve been busy since before Christmas but everything I’ve been working on for the past few months is waiting to be revealed until the scheduling wheels have turned their revolutions.

And speaking of revolutions… Pirate Utopia is a novel by Bruce Sterling that will be published by Tachyon later this year. The cover was made public this week so I can post it here. I’m also designing and illustrating the interior but it’ll be a while before I can show off any of the rest of the design, especially since I’m still working on it. Bruce Sterling is a well-known writer and futurist (with a small “f”) who was one of the leading cyberpunk authors in the 1980s; with William Gibson he collaborated on The Difference Engine (1990), an early steampunk novel. Pirate Utopia is shorter and less ambitious than The Difference Engine although both books are alternate histories, the new title being a dieselpunk affair set in the Free State of Fiume, (now Rijeka, Croatia) in 1920. The story concerns the exploits of a torpedo engineer and his gang of rude mechanics, and features appearances from some real-life characters whose identities I won’t spoil. It’s a fun book to read, and it’s great fun to work on. The brief from Tachyon was for a cover design riffing on classic Soviet propaganda posters, hence the vaguely Constructivist style. There will be more of the same inside although I’ve been poring over the works of the Italian Futurists recently, and borrowing motifs and typographic cues from designers like Fortunato Depero. Stock up on the Campari for this one.

Ten

From the Kusho series by Shinichi Maruyama.

It was February 13th, 2006, when I sat down and wrote some words from Charles Fort—”One measures a circle, beginning anywhere”—as a title of the first post here. Ten years on, and the circle has turned ten times, or once if you’re measuring in decades. This time last year I made the decision that when I reached the tenth anniversary I was going to reduce the activity a little. Writing a blog post on a different subject every single day of the week requires discipline even if it’s your main line of work. This has never been my main line of work, but I’ve nonetheless managed to rack up 4,035 posts while juggling design and illustration work, and while (somehow) writing an as-yet-unpublished 217,000-word novel. When the workload has been heavy it’s been a chore having to write another daily post yet the improvisational nature of the thing has always been fun. Writing something new every day puts you on the spot; it forces you to get your thoughts in order (or scale them back), and it also hones your writing skills. I don’t know what I expected of this blog in 2006 but I’m fairly sure I didn’t expect to be writing it daily for ten years. And yet here we are.

So with that said, I’m going to discontinue the daily posting for the time being although the weekend post will follow tomorrow as usual. One thing that’s become apparent is that the first five years were easier than the second five because I seemed to have more time on my hands. The increased visibility of my work in recent years has meant that I’ve been more in demand, and I’ve been subject to increasing periods of all work and no play. When that happens, something has to give, and not having to write something here every single day will give me an hour (or more) free time each day. There will still be posts, of course: this forum is too useful to abandon, and on the work level alone I have some high-profile projects due out this year. I’d also like to be able to write longer posts from time to time. One hazard of the daily post is that longer pieces have to be written over several days while still writing a daily post as well.

My thanks, as always, to regular readers and commenters. Don’t be alarmed by a few days’ silence. Things will continue but at a slower pace.

John x

Foreign appearances

My work has appeared in a couple of foreign collections recently, each approaching popular culture from very different directions. The volume above is called Steampunk Japan Fashion Book according to a German bookseller although the title may read differently to Japanese speakers. This was published at the end of last year, and features my ever-popular covers for the Angry Robot editions of two steampunk novels by KW Jeter, Infernal Devices and Morlock Night. The book is the work of a collective who call themselves The Japanese Steampunkers.

Meanwhile in France, Imaginaires #19: Les cultures populaires aujourd’hui is a collection of academic pieces about popular culture published by ÉPURE, Éditions et Presses universitaires de Reims. Inside there’s an essay by Xavier Giudicelli (University of Reims Chamapgne-Ardenne), The Picture of Dorian Gray et la culture populaire: du texte à la bande dessinée, which compares Wilde’s novel to various graphic adaptations. Xavier wrote to me some time ago about my Dorian Gray adaptation for the Russ Kick-edited Graphic Canon (2012) so the piece includes some of my remarks about my interpretation together with two of the pages.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Picturing Dorian Gray