James Joyce – Page 8 – { feuilleton }

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

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

Geschichte der Nacht

Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan’s mushroom houses built of breeze. Shelter, for the night.

Epigraph from Geschichte der Nacht; a quote from Ulysses by James Joyce

Commissioning the Third Ear Band to create the score for Roman Polanski’s Macbeth was an assuredly good move. Using their music to embellish static scenes of European cities at night is a less obvious one but not as inappropriate as it might seem. Swiss filmmaker Clemens Klopfenstein uses the group’s music sparingly in Geschichte der Nacht (1979), an hour-long record of unidentified streets in unidentified cities after dark. When there’s no music you have the location sound. There’s no narrative, not even in the common documentary sense, simply the atmosphere of neglect that falls over a city during the night and the early hours of the morning. The copy linked here is at Ubuweb where the contents aren’t always permanent. Watch it while you have the chance. Via Ghetto Raga, a Third Ear Band blog.

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”

Reverbstorm in print

A couple of months ago I was starting to wonder whether I’d ever see this book printed, the production process became so tortuously drawn out. But Reverbstorm is finally in print and looking exactly the way I intended with black boards, black endpapers and black ink on the page edges. The latter proved to be a costly extra which explains why it’s an uncommon effect.

More important than the book design is that the printing of the artwork is excellent, with rich blacks and pin-sharp detail throughout. You’d think that printing black-and-white pages was a fairly straightforward business but the first set of proofs were pretty disastrous, the ink bleeding over the edges of many panels and detail elsewhere being blacked in. A combination of copious cross-hatching, spattered ink and—on later pages—brush shading and monochrome painting proved to be too much when the A3 artwork was reduced to half its size. This was particularly galling since these pages had never been properly printed since they were drawn: the original comics looked glossy enough but were all produced by back-street printers who didn’t bother too much about quality, and even made mistakes. They were a necessary evil at a time when other Savoy books had been refused by printers who objected to the material they contained. The relief at finally seeing the series completed and printed to this standard is considerable.

However, I’m afraid would-be purchasers still have a slight wait before they can buy a copy. The official publication date will now be early February but copies will be available to buy from the first week in January after distribution details have been finalised. I tried to persuade Savoy to relent on this and let a few copies go out prematurely but that won’t be happening. Sorry to anyone who’s been waiting since April (!) for the book but the decision is out of my hands. I believe it’ll be worth the wait. This is a better book than The Haunter of the Dark, and the best (and last) thing I’ll do in the comics medium. Next up is Axiom, a different world entirely. More about that later.

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

Weekend links 129

Daughters of Maternal Impression by Arabella Proffer.

A genre’s landscape should be littered with used tropes half-visible through their own smoke & surrounded by salvage artists with welding sets, otherwise it isn’t a genre at all.

M. John Harrison, incisive as ever, on what he memorably labels “Pink Slime Fiction”. Elsewhere (and at much greater length) Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future by Jonathan McCalmont, and a two-part Paul Kincaid interview here and here.

• “Once upon a time, in almost every city, many rivers flowed. Why did they disappear? How? And could we see them again? This documentary tries to find answers by meeting visionary urban thinkers, activists and artists from around the world.” A trailer for Lost Rivers, written and directed by Caroline Bâcle. Related (and mentioned here before), London’s Lost Rivers: A Walker’s Guide by Tom Bolton.

• Ghosts in the Machine: “Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, a recent exhibition was imagined as a Wunderkammer simultaneously tracing and questioning the relationship between people and technology.” And in Istanbul a Wunderkammer of a different kind: Rick Poynor looks at Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence.

• “There’s a vast territory still to be explored…” Bristol duo Emptyset (James Ginzburg & Paul Purgas), many of whose releases I’ve designed, talk about their music. Tracks from their new EP on the Raster-Noton label can be heard here. You’re going to need bigger speakers.

• “I liked doing it one time but I don’t want to become the gay porn soundtrack guy.” Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance talking to Sir Richard Bishop about one of his more unusual commissions.

Double Vision (2009) by Bonnie Durham.

• FACT mix 349: Silent Servant puts together a great selection of music old and new with the emphasis on the grit of the early Industrial era.

• Read Joyce’s Ulysses line by line, for the next 22 years, with Frank Delaney’s podcast.

• Borges and the Plain Sense of Things, an article from 2006 by Gabriel Josipovici.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Equus and seeing your inspirations come full circle.

• At Pinterest: A few nice paintings of men

• Spunk [arts] magazine

• Derelict London

• Ritualistic Bug Use (2009) by Pink Skull | Demiurge Variations (2012) by Emptyset | Utopian Disaster (End) (2012) by Silent Servant.