{illustrators} – Page 11

Fender guitar catalogue, 1976

Another post prompted by 70s Sci-Fi Art, and a publication that’s very typical of its decade. The Fender guitar catalogue for 1976 showcases its product range with a series of illustrations that carefully pastiche the kind of art you’d find in books of fairy tales. Selling rock’n’roll equipment in this manner wasn’t a trend-setting step by 1976, not with the punk hordes on the march, but corporations are seldom ahead of the general culture. The cover art by Ruby K. Lee is a copy of one of Kay Nielsen’s drawings for East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Lee also provides one of the interior drawings, with the rest of the art being the work of Bruce Wolfe. (There may be another artist involved since one of the illustrations lacks a credit.) This looks like a huge amount of effort for a small product catalogue but the illustrations were also part of an ad campaign with accompanying storybook copy. It’s good to see Busorama being used for all the headings. I’ve been using this font myself for its associations with the 1970s.

Since I keep borrowing tips from 70s Sci-Fi Art I’ll note again that Adam Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s will be published by Abrams next month.

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The art of Davis Meltzer, 1929–2017

Illustrators were often easy to miss in the pre-internet days, when paperbacks published overseas could be hard to find or even see. Such is the case with Davis Meltzer whose work I hadn’t really noticed before until this cover turned up at 70s Sci-Fi Art. Meltzer had a long career as a scientific illustrator for National Geographic but his work as a cover artist for SF novels only lasted a decade, from 1970 to 1981. Not everything is as dramatically eye-catching as his Simak cover but there’s a unique sensibility at work, with only occasional similarities to other artists of his generation like Kelly Freas.

The Temptation of St. Gerome.

The piece above is from an auction site which doesn’t reveal any information apart from the title. If this was a religious illustration it’s one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. Auction listings state that Meltzer’s paintings were mostly done in gouache, a common medium for illustrators and graphic designers owing to its flat bright colours. The following selection favours the more visually arresting examples over generic spaceship art.

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Covering Maldoror

This illustration by José Roy is a frontispiece created for a rare edition of Les Chants de Maldoror published by Genonceaux in 1890. Roy (1860–1924) was a French artist whose work receives little attention today but his Maldoror illustration happens to be the first of its kind, and a picture that serves the text better than some of those being produced a few years later. The detail of a flayed man stepping out of his skin prefigures Clive Barker by almost a century, a further example of the ways in which Lautréamont’s baleful masterpiece was ahead of his time.

Netherlands, 1917. Cover art by WF Gouwe.

Previous posts here have concerned illustrated editions of Maldoror but this one is all about the covers. Literary classics aren’t always very rewarding in this respect but Maldoror’s textual and imaginative wildness has prompted an assortment of illustrative choices that range from the appropriate to the bewilderingly arbitrary. The following covers are a selection of the more notable examples, avoiding those without pictures or ones that use photographs of the book’s enigmatic author, Isidore Ducasse.

Italy, 1944. Cover art by Mario De Luigi.

France, 1947. Cover and interior illustrations by Jacques Houplain.

Salvador Dalí was the first well-known artist to illustrate Maldoror but his 1934 edition was published with plain black boards. Houplain’s illustrations follow the text more closely than do those by Dalí, Magritte or Bellmer, all of whom remain preoccupied with their own obsessions.

Belgium, 1948. Cover and interior illustrations by René Magritte.

France, 1963. Cover art by Paul Jamotte.

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Toytown psychedelia

The Teletrips of Alala (1970).

The imaginative landscapes of childhood were always close at hand in the psychedelic culture of the 1960s, more so in Britain than the USA, and especially where music was concerned. Grace Slick may have given the world White Rabbit but there’s a whole sub-genre of British psychedelic song-writing devoted to children’s games, children’s dreams, sweetshops, fairy tales and the like. Rob Chapman in his essential study of the form, Psychedelia and Other Colours, refers to this tendency as “infantasia”. With psychedelic art being so vivid and playful it’s a small step from lysergic wonderlands to children’s books styled in a quasi-psychedelic manner, which is what we have here. There was a lot of this around in the early 1970s, not all of it very memorable. Some of the best examples were published by Harlin Quist, a US/French imprint who specialised in beautiful books illustrated by exceptional talents. A few of these may be seen at The Peculiar Manicule.

Gertrude and the Mermaid (1968)
by Richard Hughes, illustrated by Nicole Claveloux.

“This is the story a little girl, her doll named Gertrude, and a mysterious mermaid-child.” The first of several books by Nicole Claveloux for Harlin Quist.

Help, Help, the Globolinks! (1970)
by Gian Carlo Menotti, translated and adapted by Leigh Dean, illustrated by Milton Glaser.

“Recounts the events following the landing of the outer-space Globolinks on Earth.” A German comic opera from 1968 in which a group of children encounter an alien invasion.

The Teletrips of Alala (1970)
by Guy Monreal, illustrated by Nicole Claveloux.

“With her unique power to enter the television set and change the course of the programs, Alala creates havoc in the world.” Nicole Claveloux puts her own twist on the Yellow Submarine art style. A few years after this she was creating comic strips for Métal Hurlant. Her more recent work includes erotic retellings of fairy tales. (more pages)

Andromedar SR1 (1971)
by Martin Ripkens & Hans Stempel, illustrated by Heinz Edelmann.

“Two astronauts under the spell of an evil octopus are ordered to steal the cobalt-blue flowers from the Martian Mice.” Ripkens and Stempel were better known for their work as cinema critics and film-makers. (more pages)

Cartulino: El asombroso doctor Zas (1971)
by Miguel Agustí, illustrated by Alberto Solsona.

A comic strip from a Spanish title, Strong. Alberto Solsona also drew Agar-Agar, the grooviest strip in the short-lived Dracula comic. Cartulino had a number of different adventures but online examples are scarce.

Los Doce Trabajos de Hércules (1973)
by Miguel Calatayud.

“Serie de episodios sobre la penitencia llevada a cabo por Hércules el mayor de los héroes griegos.” A comic adaptation rather than a story book but the art style is a good example of the general trend.

Update: Added Alberto Solsona.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Glaser goes POP
• Return to Pepperland
• The groovy look
• The psychedelic art of Nicole Claveloux
• Psychedelia and Other Colours by Rob Chapman
• David Chestnutt’s psychedelic fairy tales

Phantastische Edelmann

There’s more to Heinz Edelmann than the designs he created for Yellow Submarine, as Edelmann himself often used to remind people. And there’s more to his work for animated film than the Beatles’ exploits. Der Phantastische Film is a short introductory sequence for a long-running German TV series which has been doing the rounds for a number of years. Brief it may be but a couple of the monstrous details resemble those that Edelmann put into his covers for Tolkien’s books.

Edelmann had plans to capitalise on the success of Yellow Submarine with more films like this when he set up his own animation company, Trickfilm, but the only other example is The Transformer, a short about steam trains which he designed. (The direction was by Charlie Jenkins, with animation by Alison De Vere and Denis Rich.) Given the persistent popularity of Yellow Submarine I keep hoping someone might revive its style for something new. The first animated feature directed by Marcell Jankovics, Johnny Corncob, comes close but lacks the trippy Surrealism of the Beatles film. The Japanese can certainly do trippy Surrealism (see Mind Game or Paprika) but I’ve yet to see anything that approaches the Edelmann style. Johnny Corncob, incidentally, is now available on Region B blu-ray from Eureka. It’s worth seeing but the main film in the set, Son of the White Mare, is Jankovics’s masterpiece.

On a slightly related note, until today I hadn’t looked at ISFDB.org for Heinz Edelmann’s genre credits so I hadn’t seen this Lovecraft cover before. Hard to tell if this creature is supposed to be Cthulhu or Wilbur Whateley’s brother when The Dunwich Horror is one of the stories in the collection. Either way, it belongs in the Sea of Monsters. Insel Verlag published this one in 1968, a year before launching their special imprint devoted to fantastic literature, Bibliothek des Hauses Usher.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Return to Pepperland
• The groovy look
• The Sea of Monsters
• Yellow Submarine comic books
• Heinz Edelmann