{work} – Page 92 – { feuilleton }

New things for July

The Flapper by Frank X Leyendecker, Life magazine (1922).

• 2008 is turning out to be a great year for Lovecraft aficionados. As well as the stupendous Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft, we’re also awaiting Frank Woodford’s feature length documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. I’m lucky to have my work included in Frank’s film which is easily the best documentary to date concerning the life and work of HPL. Among the interviewees are Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Caitlin R Kiernan, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell and Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi. The film will receive its first (?) public screening later this month at the San Diego Comic Con:

Thursday, July 24
8:00–9:45pm
Room 26AB

• Over the weekend Arthur Magazine cleared the $20,000 it needed to keep running before the three-day deadline elapsed. A stunning piece of fund-raising which shows how much people value Jay and company’s efforts.

• The gorgeous cover above is the work of Frank X Leyendecker (1876–1924), brother of the more well-known (and gay) Joseph C Leyendecker. Makes me think I should make a post of Butterfly Women if only as an excuse to track down more pictures of Loie Fuller.

• Last but not least: happy birthday Lorraine!

The monstrous tome

So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the heaviest book I’ve ever come across, 400 pages of heavy-duty art paper at BIG size. (Amazon gives the dimensions as 16.1 x 12.6 x 2.3 inches or 409 x 320 x 580 mm.) The photo above shows the scale beside an old Mountains of Madness paperback (Ian Miller‘s cover art appears in full in the new book) and my own Haunter of the Dark collection. The cover art is by Michael Whelan, a detail from his wonderful 1981 HPL panoramas.

The Virgil Finlay section showing The Colour Out of Space and his definitive Lovecraft portrait.

The range of contributors past and present includes JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Hannes Bok, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V. Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, Frank Frazetta, John Holmes, Harry O. Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, Thomas Ligotti and John Jude Palencar. The introduction is by Harlan Ellison and there’s an afterword by Thomas Ligotti. Many pages fold out to reveal spreads like the Giger ones below. Print quality is exceptional, of course, but then ladling the superlatives is pointless when it’s obvious this is a sui generis masterpiece of Lovecraftian art. Naturally I’m very happy indeed to be a part of it.

Continue reading “The monstrous tome”

Aerial by 2562

This minimal CD cover is my design for Aerial, the debut album from 2562, aka Dutch musician Dave Huismans. This is another release on the Tectonic label who released Underwater Dancehall, the Pinch album I designed last year. As with that release the photos on Aerial are by Liz Eve.

This is a really excellent album but then I would say that since it’s just the kind of electronica I enjoy, in this case being pitched somewhere between the infectious rhythms of Monolake and the sparse dub sounds of Pole. Mr Huismans knows what’s he’s doing and Aerial has already picked up some rave reviews. The CD will appear on June 2nd with a double-vinyl version to follow.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for November

Horror comics

More horror…. It’s been a while since I posted anything work-related here, not because I haven’t been busy but because much of the work this year is still waiting to see the light of day as a result of protracted schedules.

The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics is an anthology from Running Press (US) that really is mammoth—over 540 pages—and includes a reprinting of my Dunwich Horror pages from The Haunter of the Dark. You can see the selections in the Sprout widget below. (Not any more you can’t. Sprout decided to make everyone pay for their previously free service. Bye bye, Sprout.) It feels a bit fraudulent being in there since my drawings are more illustrations than a comics adaptation but I imagine most people buying the book will be happy to see poor old Wilbur Whateley’s demise receive another airing. Many of the featured strips are in the hokey EC mould which is often more comic than horror (one reason I was never very taken with EC) but the material gets better as it goes along and it’s a pleasure to be in anything with an artist as good as Mike Kaluta.

The Dunwich Horror, title page (1988).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Pasticheur’s Addiction

The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997).
(Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.)

A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author Constance Eakins. A Flickr pool has been established for newly-discovered Eakins volumes and you can read more about the mysterious writer here.

This flourishing of pasticheury encourages me to post some of the cover designs I created for the various editions of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Invented and Discredited Diseases, a fake disease guide published in 2003 and edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. The anthology featured a host of notable contributors and was great fun to work on. Although these were done in colour, they were all printed in black & white inside the book, with a shrunken glimpse of the colour versions on the rear of the dust jacket. My jacket design wasn’t used on subsequent printings so this is the first many people will have seen of these.

Continue reading “Pasticheur’s Addiction”