Reverbstorm – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Reverbstorm at Supervert

Keith Seward’s Horror Panegyric was a concise examination of David Britton’s multimedia Lord Horror project which Savoy Books published in 2007. I designed the book, the cover of which was my Arcimboldo pastiche of Lord Horror’s profile which appeared on the cover of issue 3 of Reverbstorm. The Supervert site which hosts an online copy of Horror Panegyric has this month posted my answers to some questions about Reverbstorm, the series having grown out of the first Lord Horror novel and the earlier comics:

The graphics in Reverbstorm sometimes seem more narrative than the words. How did you and David work out a scenario?

I don’t have objections per se to the usual story structures but in this series we both wanted to create something that wasn’t following familiar adventure narrative lines. The precedents for me were the European comic artists from Métal Hurlant who often favoured art over story; also Burne Hogarth whose work was a great influence on the style I used to draw Lord Horror. Hogarth’s Tarzan strips are adventure narratives but in his later books it’s the art that’s paramount. James Joyce is one of the characters in Reverbstorm, and you can also find a precedent in Ulysses where the story is overwhelmed by the surface detail.

Reverbstorm began with Paul Temple’s lyrics for the Reverbstorm song and a brief Lord Horror film treatment that Dave and Mike had put together for a production company. I don’t recall much about the treatment — I only looked at it once in the office — but it concerned Horror and Jessie Matthews in New York City, opening with a sequence where his Lordship kills some policemen in an alleyway. That vague outline can be seen in the first few pages of Reverbstorm with NYC changed to Torenbürgen. Other elements taken from the film treatment included the name Blue Blaze Laudanum — the actual robotic character came later — and the Souls which likewise became more substantially developed as the comic progressed.

Once we’d introduced all the characters things developed along thematic lines rather than strictly narrative ones. So the second part introduces the Ether Jumpers, the third part has the Apes, the fourth part the Ononoes, the fifth part Picasso and T.S. Eliot, and so on. Musical structure is an obvious parallel, and I consider some of the recurring background material to be visual leifmotifs which can indicate or imply one of the three main characters even if they aren’t present on the page. This musical analogy is an important one for appreciating the series as a whole. The entwined themes and references work in a manner that’s a lot closer to musical works than to the mechanics of an adventure narrative. (more)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Reverbstorm in print
• Reverbstorm update
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• A Reverbstorm jukebox
• Reverbstorm: Bauhaus Horror
• Reverbstorm: an introduction and preview

Weekend links 150

One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne.

• Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs.

• “Witches have a fashion moment,” says the NYT. Nice clothes but the writing trots out too many of the usual lazy clichés. Related: A Tale of Witches, Woodland and Half-remembered Melodies…, a new mix by Melmoth the Wanderer.

• Calidostópia! is a free album (FLAC & mp3) from Marcus Popp aka Oval: “an enticing 16-track collaboration…with seven wonderful singers/musicians from all over South America”.

Before meeting Moorcock in person, [Hari] Kunzru went on to say, ‘I didn’t realise the role he’d played in connecting so many different scenes and undergrounds together – the psychedelic music scene, the science fiction scene, the hip experimental literature scene around people like William Burroughs, pop art’.

Brave New Worlds: A Michael Moorcock Retrospective by Carol Huston. Moorcock’s Elric novels will be published by Glénat in new bande dessinée adaptations later this year.

• More art by Michael W. Kaluta at The Golden Age. And more fantastic comics/illustration by Philippe Caza at 50 Watts. There’s more Caza here.

• Mine and David Britton’s new book, Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, was reviewed at The Spectator.

• Google Street Scene: “Moments of cinema captured by Google Street View cameras”.

• Cosmic Sentinels and Spiral Jetties: JG Ballard, Robert Smithson & Tacita Dean

• Strange Flowers showcases the heads of Pavel Tchelitchew, 1949–1952.

• Setting in the East: Diamanda Galás on Women and Real Horror

• Little Joe: “A magazine about queers and cinema, mostly.”

• Nanoparticles loaded with bee venom kill HIV.

• Treatises on Dust: Antic Found Texts

• The Wizard Blew His Horn (1975) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock) | Brothel In Rosenstrasse (1982) by Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix | Running Through The Back Brain (1983) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock)

Covering Joyce

First editions of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

I like Peter Mendelsund’s book cover designs so it’s good to find the designer given the opportunity to provide new covers for James Joyce. Mendelsund’s blog post announcing the news mentions nothing about his intentions, instead we have a reminiscence about Ireland à la Molly Bloom, and pictures of the three covers below.

I’ve never felt a pictorial treatment works with Joyce; his books, especially the Big Two, concentrate so much on words and the labyrinths made by language that anything other than a purely typographic treatment seems superfluous. Art directors going the pictorial route generally end up using familiar photos of the author or views of Dublin circa 1900. The first editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake set the pattern for many later editions, and I’ll guess it’s that pattern which Peter Mendelsund has followed here. The typeface used is Poetica, a Robert Slimbach design from 1992, completed by what may be Joyce’s own hand (I’m guessing again) in the manner of the author’s corrected typescripts. The amendments for Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist don’t require explanation but what about the title of Ulysses? I’d read this (so to speak) as representing the novel’s two main characters—Stephen Dedalus: the cold and precise man of letters, and Leopold Bloom: the all-too-human Everyman—who in their circumambulation and eventual meeting comprise the twin poles of the story. There’s also a subtle and clever allusion to Molly Bloom but I’ll let you find that…

The three new books will be published by Vintage but I’ve not managed to find a publication date.

In other Joyce news, the first Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake has proved to be a surprising bestseller. And I ought to mention that Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, my own Joycean excursion (among other things) with David Britton, is now available at Amazon. You can, of course, still buy the book direct from the publishers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• Joyce in Time
• Happy Bloomsday
• Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
• Books for Bloomsday

Reverbstorm on sale

At long last, the news that many people have been waiting for: the Reverbstorm book is now on sale at Savoy. From the hyperbolic press release:

“Surfin’ bird Bbbbbbbbbbrbrbrbrbrb…awawawawawawawaaaaaah! A-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-ooma-mow-mow Papa-oom-mow-mow!” The Trashmen, Surfin’ Bird

Welcome to the nightmare metropolis of Torenbürgen, where New York’s Art Deco architecture has fused with the termination machinery of Auschwitz. In this urban inferno Jessie Matthews is singing Sondheim, James Joyce is at work on a new novel and Lord Horror, ex-Nazi propaganda broadcaster and Torenbürgen’s model citizen, is stalking the streets in search of fresh victims for his razors. Murderous apes infest the alleyways, Ononoes feast on the living and the dead, while above the rooftops the Soul of the Virgin Mary drifts like a swollen Lovecraftian dirigible, picking at bodies destined for the charnel furnaces.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm is a unique graphic collaboration between writer David Britton, the author of four Lord Horror novels, and artist John Coulthart, whose book of Lovecraft-derived comic strips and illustrations, The Haunter of the Dark, featured a collaboration with Alan Moore. Reverbstorm was originally published in serial form and is now being presented in a single volume for the very first time. Britton’s debut novel, Lord Horror (1990), was the last work of fiction to be banned in the UK; an earlier Lord Horror comic series, Hard Core Horror, was also banned by a British court in 1995. Coulthart’s death-camp artwork from the final issue in that series appears in Reverbstorm as a prelude to the main narrative.

There’s never been a comic like this surreal collision between Modernist art and pulp aesthetics, a world where Finnegans Wake is drenched in Alligator Wine and Picasso’s Guernica is invaded by Tarzan’s simian hordes. Ambitious, transgressive and meticulously rendered, Reverbstorm is one answer to the eternal question posed by those cultural philosophers, The Cramps: “How far can too far go?”

“Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn-
tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Witkinesque

Arriving in the post this week, a Christmas gift from Supervert, a chapbook featuring a new piece of writing that purports to be the unauthorised biography of American artist/photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The premise is that the facts of the real Witkin’s life are far too mundane to account for his extraordinary photo tableaux so Supervert supplies details such as “Mary Witkin [his mother] worked as a bookkeeper in a DDT plant, slowly saving to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the absurd.” A metaphysical portrait of the artist, then, with echoes of David Lynch or Bruno Schulz. Inside the chapbook was a promo postcard bearing pictures of the delightful Ms. Stoya whose reading of Necrophilia Variations has now gained over four million YouTube views.

The Witkin book isn’t for sale but copies are available to those who enter the Supervert contest which is running throughout December. All you need do is enter an email address here then keep your fingers crossed.

Sanitarium, New Mexico (1983) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

Witkin’s tableaux made an immediate impression circa 1993 when I bought a copy of PhotoVision, a Spanish photography journal which had devoted an entire issue to his work. This arrived at a point when I was halfway through drawing the Reverbstorm comic series, and Witkin’s parade of unorthodox humanity, crucified apes and sundry body parts seemed an ideal complement for the parade of similar grotesqueries (and sundry body parts) we were putting into the comic pages. I also liked the way Witkin worked his own variation on familiar scenes from art history, something we were doing throughout Reverbstorm (Witkin’s Vase: Study For the Base of the Crucifix just happens to combine a partly dissected human skull with Picasso’s Guernica, a recurrent motif throughout the series).

Above and below, some of the more Witkinesque details from part seven of Reverbstorm. The main figure above was a direct reference to Witkin’s Sanitarium, New Mexico. Many figures in other drawings are given Witkin-like blindfolds.

Continue reading “Witkinesque”