Jules Verne – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Morlocks, airships and curious cabinets

Things I was working on late last year continue to percolate or, if you prefer, build a head of steam. My cover for KW Jeter’s Morlock Night appears in a short piece by Rick Poynor in July’s Creative Review. That feature is prompted by the British Library’s Out of the World exhibition. Nice to see something of mine with Hannes Bok’s illustration for Who Goes There? by John W Campbell, the story which was filmed as The Thing from Another World, and later, John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Morlock Night is also one of my contributions to the lavish Steampunk Bible which editors SJ Chambers and Jeff VanderMeer have been promoting for the past couple of months. USA Today ran a feature on the book which included my piscine airship among the selected illustrations.

Next up will be the Thackery T Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities for which I’ve provided a number of illustrations and decorative title pages. Jeff V has a preview shot of the cover. That will be out next month. More later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Steampunk Bible
• Steampunk Reloaded
• Steampunk overloaded!
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

The Steampunk Bible

Cover and interior designs by Galen Smith.

Arriving in your book emporia this week is The Steampunk Bible by Jeff VanderMeer & SJ Chambers, a comprehensive guide to the sub-genre which is now a thriving sub-culture. I contributed some bits of graphic design as well as a bespoke dirigible illustration (see below). The book also features a few other steampunk-related pieces of mine among its wealth of photos and illustrations. This is a typically lavish production from Abrams, beautifully designed by Galen Smith with a cover based on the celebrated Hetzel editions of Jules Verne’s novels. Inside there are essay contributions from Bruce Sterling, Catherynne M Valente, Jess Nevins and others. If you’re a steampunk enthusiast (or know one) this is an essential purchase. Some links and page samples follow below.

• The official Steampunk Bible site
• The Steampunk Bible: Mecha-Elephants, Raygun Rocketships, and Great Stories, a feature by Jeff V.
• Amazon US | Amazon UK | Book Depository | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound

My cover for KW Jeter’s Morlock Night which has just been republished by Angry Robot.

My brief was to create a cannon-bedecked piscine dirigible so this is what I came up with. See it in all its belligerent glory here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk Reloaded
• Steampunk overloaded!
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

Weekend links 27

Annie Duels The Sun (2010) by Angie Wang.

I’m interviewed again, this time by James at Cardboard Cutout Sundown. Covering familiar subjects for {feuilleton} readers: art history, design, Lovecraft, the genre/mainstream seesaw, etc. Related: Jeff VanderMeer previewed my design for the forthcoming Steampunk Reloaded.

• Battle over legacy of father of Art Nouveau. Prague authorities are demanding the paintings which comprise Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic be moved to the capital.

• The films that time forgot. David Thomson on ten neglected works including a cult favourite of mine, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970).

• The Viatorium Press: “Fine letterpress printing, digital typography, and hand painted illumination.” Among their recent productions is a poem by Clark Ashton Smith.

À la conquête du pôle (1912); Georges Méliès vs. Jules Verne.

• Taxandria, a feature-length collaboration between Raoul Servais, François Schuiten and, er, Alain Robbe-Grillet, is on YouTube. My earlier post about the film is here.

• Salvagepunk, or (maybe) Post-post-modernism: “How a music micro-trend heralds an emerging, internet-enabled, aesthetic movement.” See also the latest issue of The Wire.

• Drainspotting with Remo Camerota: documenting Japan’s creative manhole covers.

• Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of squid: a book devoted to Kraken Black Spiced Rum.

• After Stanley Kubrick. Christiane Kubrick on life without Stanley K.

• Pills and penises and kissing boys: Tara Sinn’s Kaleidoscopes.

• Found Objects: a hauntological dumping ground.

• Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an.

• RIP Frank Kermode.

• Feuerland (1968) by Theo Schumann Combo; Feuerland (1977) by Michael Rother; Feuerland (2007) by Justus Köhnke.

Echoes of the Cities

Mysterieux retour du Capitaine Nemo.

This week has been incredibly hectic work-wise but I’ve managed to keep these posts going, so here’s the last one devoted to an appreciation of the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. A week of posts barely scratches the surface of their vast and involved creation of alternate worlds, fantasy design and architecture, and Borges-like metaphysical speculation. When I try to explain my disaffection with the popular end of American comics, it’s works such as these which I offer as an alternative. The problem, of course, is that only a handful of the books have been translated into English, a detail which tells you all you need to know about English-speaking comics publishers and—since demand fuels the market—their readers.

This final set of pictures is a selection from Schuiten and Peeters’ L’Echo des Cités (1993), a facsimile edition of the main newspaper which serves the cities of the Obscure World. Unfortunately, this remains untranslated but the bulk of the book is full-page illustrations, many of which are among Schuiten’s best. A number of these were later reprinted as limited lithograph prints.

Les rêves engloutis d’Oscar Frobelius.

Continue reading “Echoes of the Cities”

Further tales from the Obscure World

L’enfant penchée.

We’re at the penultimate post in this week-long tribute to the Cités Obscures series of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and there isn’t enough space left to cover some of the more recent volumes in detail. What follows is a quick skate through three more major works.

L’enfant penchée.

L’enfant penchée (1996), or The Leaning Child, is an expanded version of a 1995 children’s story by Schuiten and Peeters, Mary la penchée. Mary is the young daughter of wealthy industrialists from Mylos struck down one day by some cosmic calamity which shifts her centre of gravity, causing her to permanently lean at an apparently impossible angle. When she’s bullied at school she runs away and joins a circus. A meeting with scientists and astronomers leads to a resolving of her affliction, and the repairing of her ruined life. This is a fascinating story for a number of reasons, not least the existence of a parallel narrative taking place in our world which is conveyed using photographs, and which unveils some of the metaphysical aspects of the Obscure World. The story of Mary is also flawlessly drawn. Schuiten uses a black-and-white style modelled on the work of old magazine illustrators like Franklin Booth, and there are further references to Winsor McCay and Jules Verne.

Continue reading “Further tales from the Obscure World”