{"id":16125,"date":"2014-12-15T04:08:39","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T03:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=16125"},"modified":"2014-12-15T05:43:42","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T04:43:42","slug":"moorcock-faith-hope-and-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2014\/12\/15\/moorcock-faith-hope-and-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"Moorcock: Faith, Hope and Anxiety"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"moorcock.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo of the author by Linda Moorcock.<\/em><\/p>\n

I mentioned a few days ago that I had another new piece of work to reveal, and this is it, a poster\/promotional piece<\/a> for Russell Wall’s forthcoming documentary about Michael Moorcock. The main challenge with one was to create something that would give a sense of Moorcock’s extensive career and the genre-spanning content of his many books.<\/p>\n

\"mm1.jpg\"<\/p>\n

I took the 1970s as the starting point, since this was the period when his reputation as a writer was established worldwide. The decade began with Britain’s bookshelves being colonised by Moorcock’s SF and fantasy novels published by Mayflower with vivid covers; it saw a cult feature film\u2014The Final Programme<\/em>\u2014made from his first Jerry Cornelius novel, and it ended with the fourth Jerry Cornelius novel, The Condition of Muzak<\/em>, winning a serious literary award, the Guardian Fiction Prize.<\/p>\n

\"mm2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

So the general appearance of the design, the headline typography, and the colour scheme are a nod to the Mayflower covers and especially to Bob Haberfield’s artwork<\/a> which often used a similar style of Tibetan flames and clouds. The rest of the type is set in Rockwell, a preferred typeface of the Hipgnosis design team for much of the 1970s. Early on I had the idea of filling the design with stylised graphics like those used by some of the Hipgnosis illustrators, chiefly George Hardie<\/a>, but that idea receded once the composition began to arrange itself. The fountain pen is the main hangover from this, a hard-edged graphic tilted at an angle like many of Hardie’s illustrations. The pen is a little inappropriate given that Moorcock is famous for knocking out novels at speed on a typewriter but it made a good visual rhyme with the guitar, a Rickenbacker like the one the author played in his Deep Fix band.<\/p>\n

\"mm3.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Elsewhere there are many specific references competing for attention: the Elric head is Jim Cawthorn’s illustration from the first edition of Stormbringer<\/em><\/a> (1965); the Jerry Cornelius figure (straddling a repurposed Mayflower logo) is one of Mal Dean’s best, as seen on the cover of issue 191 of New Worlds<\/em> magazine<\/a>; the sorcerous blades are my own designs from 1985 as seen on the sleeve of Hawkwind’s Chronicle of the Black Sword<\/em><\/a> album; the Beardsley figures from Salom\u00e9<\/em> were a vague gesture to the 1890s but the Pierrot figure happens to be one Moorcock used for a while as a bookplate<\/a>, something I didn’t know until I’d placed it in the design; the cat at Pierrot’s feet is another Beardsley from one of the Bon-Mots<\/em> books; the London skyline is a contemporary one, London past and present having been a continual feature of Moorcock’s writing throughout his career. Lastly, all these details are contained by a graphic based on Abram Games’ BBC TV ident<\/a> from the 1950s. When Russell and I began talking about this project the words “television biography” were being used so this would have connected to that idea, and to the decade when Moorcock’s career began.<\/p>\n

\"mm4.jpg\"<\/p>\n

I don’t know when the documentary will be released but any news will be posted here in due course. There’s also talk of making copies of the poster available for purchase but nothing concrete has been decided yet.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds<\/a>
\n\u2022 Elric 1: Le tr\u00f4ne de rubis<\/a>
\n\u2022 Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Best of Michael Moorcock<\/a>
\n\u2022 Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo of the author by Linda Moorcock. I mentioned a few days ago that I had another new piece of work to reveal, and this is it, a poster\/promotional piece for Russell Wall’s forthcoming documentary about Michael Moorcock. The main challenge with one was to create something that would give a sense of Moorcock’s extensive … Continue reading “Moorcock: Faith, Hope and Anxiety”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,4,21,7,43,20,23],"tags":[5475,94,2238,700,591,4706,222,430,1236,2611,6783,440,65,346,6784,123],"class_list":["post-16125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-design","category-fantasy","category-film","category-magazines","category-science-fiction","category-work","tag-abram-games","tag-aubrey-beardsley","tag-bob-haberfield","tag-eduardo-paolozzi","tag-elric","tag-george-hardie","tag-hawkwind","tag-hipgnosis","tag-james-cawthorn","tag-jerry-cornelius","tag-linda-moorcock","tag-mal-dean","tag-michael-moorcock","tag-new-worlds","tag-russell-wall","tag-salome"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-4c5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}