John Coulthart's Blog, page 3

Karel Zeman film posters

A festival poster from 2022. Zeman’s films are popular in Japan.

Last week’s post about Czech film-maker Karel Zeman prompted me to see whether any more of his feature films have become available on disc. The international success of Zeman’s semi-animated adventures led to the production of more films along similar lines, although not all of these are as fantastic (or as popular) as Invention for Destruction or Baron Munchausen. A Jester’s Tale, for example, is a historical drama, albeit one which still makes use of Zeman’s skill with animation and special effects. The Karel Zeman Museum in Prague has been slowly restoring and reissuing the director’s features on DVD and blu-ray discs, the most recent title being The Stolen Airship, another film based on Jules Verne’s novels which I’m looking forward to seeing. The museum has also been increasing its production of spin-off products, including poster prints which include a couple of designs I hadn’t seen before. Browsing the poster sites revealed a few more attractive designs for international releases.

The Treasure of Bird Island (1953)

Czech, 1953. Art by Jindrich Cech.

I still haven’t seen Zeman’s first two features. The Treasure of Bird Island is wholly animated story based on a Persian fairy tale.

Journey to Prehistory (1955)

Poland, 1955. Art by Jan Mlodozeniec.

Zeman’s second feature is his first film to mix live action and animation, with a story about a group of boys whose journey down a river leads to an encounter with prehistoric creatures. I like the way this poster reduces the narrative to its basic elements while also looking like a design for a Godzilla-themed postage stamp.

Invention for Destruction (1958)

Czech, 1958. Art by Karel Knechtl.

A film I’ve enthused about before, and an ideal place to start with Zeman’s fantasies.

Poland, 1958. Art by Jan Lenica.

“That looks like a Jan Lenica design,” I thought, and so it is. The human-headed fish vehicle has little to do with Zeman’s film but a character like this wouldn’t be out of place in one of Lenica’s own animations, especially Labirynt.

Hungary, 1958. Art by Gabriela Hajnalova.

France, 1961. Art by Roger Soubie.

The French, unsurprisingly, give a prominent credit to the author whose novels inspired the film.

Japan, 2004.

The Japanese produced a number of vivid collage posters for Zeman’s films in 2004. The best ones are this and the one for Baron Munchausen.

Baron Munchausen (1962)

Czech, 1962. Art by Josef Flejsar.

Zeman’s other great fantasy feature, and another good one start with. It’s also probably the best Baron Munchausen film (not that I’ve seen them all), having the requisite lightness of tone while also looking like a succession of engraved illustrations brought to life.

Poland, 1962. Art by Franciszek Starowieyski.

A typically inventive composition by Starowieyski which gives the Arcimboldo treatment to an arrangement of Munchausen-related objects including the Baron’s horse and the Baron himself. Those tiny white marks look like print errors or jpeg artefacts but I think they’re supposed to be labels fixed to all the different objects.

Japan, 2004.

A Jester’s Tale (1964)

Czech, 1964. Art by Jiri Hilmar.

Poland, 1966. Art by Franciszek Starowieyski.

The Stolen Airship (1967)

The Stolen Airship, 1967. Czech design by Zdenek Ziegler.

A pair of impressive designs by one of the best Czech poster designers.

Czech, 1967. Art by Zdenek Ziegler.

Poland, 1967. Art by Andrzej Krajewski.

On the Comet (1970)

Czech, 1970. Art by Zdenek Ziegler.

Another pair of Ziegler designs for the last of Zeman’s Verne-derived adventures. This was also the last of his big feature films, after which he returned to producing animated stories for children.

Czech, 1970. Art by Zdenek Ziegler.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Inspiration, a film by Karel Zeman
• Zemania

Weekend links 793

Shinagawa, Tokyo Tower (Tokaido Station 1) (1967) by Sekino Jun’ichiro.

• “The historical figures who interested [Cormac] McCarthy the most, judging by the number of books he owned about them, were Albert Einstein (114 books), Winston Churchill (88) and James Joyce (78). Architecture is the dominant subject in the collection, with 855 books. The human being whom McCarthy most admired, Dennis confirms, was Ludwig Wittgenstein. The team catalogued a staggering 142 books by or about the philosopher, with a high proportion annotated.” Richard Grant for Smithsonian Magazine reports on the cataloguing of Cormac McCarthy’s personal library.

• The Real City of the Future: a long read by Charles T. Rubin taking in William Gibson’s urban fictions and Paolo Soleri’s towering Arcologies.

• At Colossal: “Atmospheric oil paintings by Martin Wittfooth illuminate nature’s timeless cycles.”

• Old music: White Souls In Black Suits by Clock DVA, receiving its first reissue since 1990.

• At the BFI: Carmen Gray on where to begin with Sergei Parajanov.

• At Ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon: The art of Sekino Jun’ichiro.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Unica Zürn Day (restored and expanded).

• New music: Imploded Versions by The Bug vs. Ghost Dubs.

• The Strange World of…Van Morrison.

• Dev Hynes’ favourite albums.

• Carnival Of Souls (1989) by David Van Tieghem | All Souls (1989) by Opal | The Cult Of Souls (2011) by The Wounded Kings

Inspiration, a film by Karel Zeman

I thought I’d written about this one before; I had but only a brief mention in a post about Czech film-maker Karel Zeman which links to a deleted YouTube copy of the film. More of a glass world than a crystal world, Inspiration (1948) is Zeman’s most celebrated short, one which predates his marvellous semi-animated features based on books by Jules Verne and others.

A creator of glass ornaments abandons his unsatisfying sketching to gaze at the rain running down a window pane. Outside the window the water gathered on a leaf contains an ice-like world of frozen surfaces, penguins, swans and skating figures. It’s an entrancing piece that makes glass figurines seem as pliable as creatures fashioned from clay or Plasticine. The film is also notable for a musical accompaniment by Zdenek Liska, one of the composer’s earliest scores that sounds rather anonymous next to the idiosyncrasies of his later works.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zemania

Crystal worlds

The Crystal World by JG Ballard. An illustration by Virgil Finlay for the Summer–August 1966 issue of Things To Come, the Science Fiction Book Club mailer.

1: Crystal words

JG Ballard didn’t have a pleasant experience with LSD when Michael Moorcock procured a dose of the drug for him in 1967, describing his acid trip in later years as a “psychotic nightmare”. I’ve often wondered how Ballard’s fiction might have developed in the 1970s if his experience had been a more positive one, something I was thinking about again when re-reading The Illuminated Man, a story collected in The Terminal Beach which was later reworked as The Crystal World, the fourth book in Ballard’s disaster quartet. There’s a psychedelic strain to Ballard’s writing which has long been overwhelmed by the popular enthusiasm for the condensed fictions of The Atrocity Exhibition and the three “concrete” novels of the 1970s: Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise. The Crystal World was published in 1966 when LSD was still legally available in Britain, and even though the genesis of the book pre-dates the decade’s psychedelic fervour, the bejewelled prose chimes so well with the mood of the time it’s easy to assume it was inspired by psychedelic experience. Many readers thought as much, and in interviews Ballard had to emphasise that the novel was a product of his imagination and nothing more.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1964. Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.

After devastating the planet with plausible disasters in his first three novels, Ballard in The Crystal World offers a distinctly fantastic scenario, in which an interstellar phenomenon (“the Hubble Effect”) is manifesting on Earth as the spontaneous crystallisation of all objects, animate or inanimate. The process begins in isolated areas before spreading worldwide; in keeping with many other Ballard stories from this period, time is responsible for the changes taking place:

Just as a supersaturated solution will discharge itself into a crystalline mass, so the supersaturation of matter in a continuum of depleted time leads to its appearance in a parallel spatial matrix. As more and more time “leaks” away, the process of supersaturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence.

The Illuminated Man

As with other Ballard stories, the scientific hand-waving is merely a pretext. In The Illuminated Man and The Crystal World “leaking time” provides an excuse to transform areas of Florida swamp and African jungle into glittering arcades of prismatic foliage, where birds are crystallised in mid-flight, reptiles transmute into heraldic emblems, and everything fluoresces with an iridescent radiance. The Illuminated Man is a sketch of the novel, with a different location but similar events, in which a hazardous mutating landscape becomes the stage for a small group characters pursuing each other and their own obsessions. Landscape is the important factor in The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World; all three novels are essentially Surrealist landscapes whose reflections of interior states are the primary interest of the novelist, the narrative and the characters being very much secondary elements. In this respect it’s disappointing that The Crystal World has yet to be brought to life by an inspired illustrator, as we’ll see below. And while the novel may seem to be the least realistic of Ballard’s disasters it has a connection to future events. The Illuminated Man offers one of the first examples in science fiction (maybe the first) of an isolated zone which is being transformed by an extraterrestrial phenomenon, a concept usually credited to the Strugatsky Brothers in their novel Roadside Picnic (1972), and popularised by Andrei Tarkovsky in Stalker (1979). (Algis Budrys had done something similar in an earlier novel, Rogue Moon, but Budrys’s infected zone isn’t located on the Earth.) Tarkovsky’s film would subsequently provide the containment zone around the irradiated region of Pripyat in Ukraine with a template for unauthorised behaviour, where the illicit guides to the region took to describing themselves as “stalkers”. Until my re-read of The Illuminated Man I hadn’t registered Ballard’s reference to an additional outbreak of crystallisation occurring in the Pripet Marshes in what was then the Soviet Union, a vast region that includes the irradiated zone of Pripyat. The Soviet scientists attempt to deal with outbreak in their usual inefficient manner but for the world at large efficiency proves to be of little consequence either way; Ballard’s disasters aren’t problems to be solved, as they would have been for an earlier generation of writers. Global calamity is dealt with by gradual accommodation, and a reconfiguring of the human psyche which eventually comes to accept the altered landscape.

2: Crystal visions

Celestial Tree (1976) by Robert Venosa.

The most obvious psychedelic elements of The Crystal World are the novel’s emphasis on rainbow spectra and brilliant lights, the endless descriptions of prismatic diffractions and iridescence. But jewels and crystals are an important feature of psychedelic and visionary experience, a quality that Aldous Huxley explored at length in Heaven and Hell (1956):

Men have spent enormous amounts of time, energy and money on the finding, mining and cutting of coloured pebbles. Why? The utilitarian can offer no explanation for such fantastic behaviour. But as soon as we take into account the facts of visionary experience, everything becomes clear. In vision, men perceive a profusion of what Ezekiel calls “stones of fire,” of what Weir Mitchell describes as “transparent fruit.” These things are self-luminous, exhibit a preternatural brilliance of colour and possess a preternatural significance. The material objects which most nearly resemble these sources of visionary illumination are gem stones. To acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose preciousness is guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other World.

Hence man’s otherwise inexplicable passion for gems and hence his attribution to precious stones of therapeutic and magical virtue. The causal chain, I am convinced, begins in the psychological Other World of visionary experience, descends to earth and mounts again to the theological Other World of heaven. In this context the words of Socrates, in the Phaedo, take on a new significance. There exists, he tells us, an ideal world above and beyond the world of matter. “In this other earth the colours are much purer and much more brilliant than they are down here…. The very mountains, the very stones have a richer gloss, a lovelier transparency and intensity of hue. The precious stones of this lower world, our highly prized cornelians, jaspers, emeralds and all the rest, are but the tiny fragments of these stones above. In the other earth there is no stone but is precious and exceeds in beauty every gem of ours.”

In The Illuminated Man Ballard extends his own thoughts about precious stones to touch on the numinous:

Perhaps it is this gift of time which accounts for the eternal appeal of precious gems, as well as of all baroque painting and architecture? Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than their own volume of space, so contain a greater ambient time, providing that unmistakable premonition of immortality sensed within St Peter’s or the palace at Nymphenburg. By contrast the architecture of the 20th century, characteristically one of rectangular unornamented facades, of simple Euclidean space and time, is that of the New World, confident of its firm footing in the future and indifferent to those pangs of mortality which haunt the mind of old Europe.

A moment of frozen time: Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876) by Gustave Moreau.

There’s an overt spirituality to The Illuminated Man and The Crystal World (both stories feature priests among their small cast of characters), which again seems psychedelic when placed in the context of crystalline transmutation, and which is diametrically opposed to the hard-edged materialism of the late novels. The second part of The Crystal World takes its title from the short story, with “illuminated” here referring to a process of psychological (or even spiritual) illumination in addition to the more obvious generation of light.

A late manifestation of the Symbolist Ballard, 1982. Cover art by Bill Botten.

I think of this side of Ballard’s work as less religious than Symbolist, an expression of his enthusiasm for Symbolist art and artists; the opening chapter of The Crystal World has the priest with an artist’s surname, Father Balthus, comparing the gloomy light around Port Matarre to the impending storm in Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. The painting chosen to wrap the covers of the first edition of The Crystal World was The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst, a choice almost certainly suggested by Ballard himself who included the same picture in a list of favourite Surrealist paintings for New Worlds. The painting is the closest that Ernst gets to the jewelled settings of Gustave Moreau, an artist whose Byzantine architectures are studded with precious stones.

The Symbolist Ballard surfaced in occasional short stories throughout the late 60s and the concrete 70s but didn’t return in full until 1979 with the publication of The Unlimited Dream Company. The novel is such a dramatic break with the concrete novels it suggests a sudden release of pressure, as the Symbolist Ballard erupts into life with another story about the wholesale transformation of a circumscribed zone. The locus this time is Ballard’s home territory of Shepperton which is turned into a tropical paradise by the arrival of a wounded pilot (significantly named Blake) whose small plane has crashed into the River Thames. Blake may be suffering from brain damage, he may be imagining all the novel’s events in the moments before his death, or he may even be a new messiah; as with The Crystal World, the explanation is a side issue, the author is more interested in the transformed environment and its effect on the inhabitants of the town.

3: Crystal covers

US hardcover first edition, 1966. Cover art: a detail of The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst. The first UK edition used the same painting but with a different type design.

When I wrote a few years ago about the illustrators of Ballard’s Vermilion Sands it was notable that the most successful representations of the stories were the earliest ones. The same is true for The Crystal World, the first cover is easily the best of a poor collection. Looking at so much lacklustre artwork you wouldn’t know that the novel is filled with descriptions of glittering and radiant crystalline foliage. In 1981 Dragon’s World published a large-format edition of The Drowned World that was illustrated throughout by Dick French, but Ballard’s other disaster novels have yet to receive such sympathetic treatment.

The selection that follows favours the covers that feature some degree of illustration. Too many covers for this novel choose the laziest possible option, pairing a close-up photo of crystals with a few lines of type.

Brazil, 1967. Cover art by Lima de Freitas.

USA, 1967. No artist credited.

UK, 1968. Cover art (which wraps the book) by Max Ernst.

Germany, 1969. Cover art by Heinz Edelmann and Klaus Kammerichs.

UK, 1970. Cover art by Richard Whittern.

USA, 1976. Cover art by Stephen Fabian.

A painting by Peter Goodfellow for a UK paperback, 1978.

The cover painting for the first copy of the book that I owned. Goodfellow doesn’t quite convey the sense that everything is being crystallised but he’s halfway there. I suspect the sombre background may have been a request from an art editor to avoid having too much detail interfering with the typography.

USA, 1981. No artist credited.

UK, 1984. A print by James Marsh from his cover painting.

Ballard in the 1970s always described himself as a science-fiction writer, and was still doing so in 1983 in Sam Scoggins’ short film portrait, The Unlimited Dream Company. He often seemed to relish the outsider status the label gave him, he wasn’t one of those SF writers you’d find moaning whenever they detected a new slight from the sniffy literary establishment. The covers of Ballard’s paperbacks accordingly followed generic trends until 1984 when the huge success of Empire of the Sun forced the sniffy literary establishment to pay its author serious attention. Ballard’s books were duly reprinted with James Marsh providing the cover art. Marsh is an excellent artist but on this occasion his small, square paintings were crowded by blurbs and graphic elements. The jewel-eyed snake is a detail from the novel.

France, 1989. Cover art by Pierre Cavalleiro.

Spain, 1991. Cover art by Robert Venosa.

A missed opportunity. If I was going to choose a non-Surrealist painting for the cover of this particular novel I’d immediately try something by Robert Venosa, an artist who seldom painted anything that didn’t look vitreous or crystallised. Presenting Venosa’s work like this, however, isn’t the way to do it.

France, 2008. Cover art by Vincent Froissard.

UK, 2014. Art by Stanley Donwood.

Donwood is best known for the cover art he’s produced for his musician friends in Radiohead. He isn’t a book cover artist yet he was asked to design a whole run of Ballard books in 2014, with very unsatisfying results. The design equivalent of publishers commissioning novels from celebrities.

France, 2015. Cover art by Johann Bodin.

USA, 2018. No artist credited.

4: Crystal rooms

Seizure.

The music world started feeding on Ballard’s work in the late 1970s but the insular art world wouldn’t pay him much attention for another 20 years. Most of the gallery interest has concentrated on The Atrocity Exhibition and the concrete novels, Crash in particular. The appearance of Roger Hiorns’ Seizure in 2008 was a welcome move in a different direction, even though it isn’t directly related to Ballard’s novel. This is the work where Hiorns took over a council flat scheduled for demolition whose interior surfaces he covered with thick growths of vivid copper sulphate crystals. Hiorn’s admires Ballard’s novels (the concrete stuff, inevitably), but says he only started reading The Crystal World after work on Seizure was underway. Even so, critics compared the overwhelmed flat to the novel, and Robert Macfarlane mentions the installation in his recent introduction to the book. To date this is the closest we get to a manifestation of the Hubble Effect in our own world. I suggest you look at photos of Hiorns’ crystals while listening to The Crystal World by Hawksmoor.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard’s sextet
• Picturing Vermilion Sands
• Ballard and the painters
• Roger Hiorns’ crystal world

Weekend links 792

West Side Story (1961) poster designed by Joe Caroff.

• “From the very moment of its inception, the Wound Man was an image intimately tied to actual practice. He was in fact many, many things at once: epistemic diagram, medical tool, affective muse, technical spur, international artwork.” Jack Hartnell explores the tortured paths of book illustration known as the Wound Man.

• At The Daily Heller: The late Joe Caroff, who Steven Heller calls “the most prolific designer you’ve never heard of”.

• From V to Vineland and Inherent Vice: John Keenan ranks Thomas Pynchon’s books.

• Sometimes Easy, Sometimes Hard: Toby Manning on Harmonia’s Deluxe at 50.

• At Unquiet Things: The infinite cosmos of Martina Hoffmann.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Sanam.

• The Strange World of…Joe McPhee.

• RIP Terence Stamp.

• Gravity’s Angel (1984) by Laurie Anderson | Wounder (2006) by Burial | Melodie Is A Wound (2025) by Stereolab

A Country Doctor, a film by Koji Yamamura

Writing about Koji Yamamura’s Parade de Satie a couple of months ago, I mentioned his adaptation of a Franz Kafka story, A Country Doctor (2007), and here it is. The Kafka adaptation was made a few years before Parade de Satie, and differs so much from the later film that you’d think they were the work of different directors. Where Parade is colourful, frivolous, and as lively as the ballet it was based upon, A Country Doctor is dark, disturbing and unpredictable. Yamamura says he chose the Kafka story from a collection of stories presented to him by a production company, only one of which appealed to him. This, coincidentally, is how Orson Welles came to direct The Trial, after producer Alexander Salkind suggested he choose a book to adapt from a list that Salkind gave him.

The events of Yamamura’s film—a country doctor is called out on a snowy night to attend to a young patient—are typical of Kafka in his shorter mode, in which absurb or dream-like situations have a tendency to slide into nightmare. Yamamura depicts the doctor’s visit in a sketchy hand-drawn style where the figures and their surroundings are continually subject to wild distortions and abrupt alterations of perspective. It’s the type of physical exaggeration that you see in the UPA cartoons of the 1950s but in those films the effect is almost always deployed for comic effect. When used in a more realistic context the distortions add to the dream-like quality of Yamamura’s film. The story is augmented by a fine score composed by Hitomi Shimizu which includes an Ondes Martenot among the instruments. If I’d have seen this in 2011 I would have included it on my list of notable Kafka film and TV adaptations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s machine
• The Metamorphosis of Mr Samsa, a film by Caroline Leaf
• Kafkaesque
• Screening Kafka
• Designs on Kafka
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• A postcard from Doctor Kafka
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka

Evelyn Paul’s Myths & Legends of Japan

I don’t think I’ve encountered anything by British artist Evelyn Paul (1883–1963) before, but she illustrated a number of books before and after Myths & Legends of Japan, a guide to Japanese folklore which was published in 1912. The book by F. Hadland Davis differs from similar volumes which tend to be simple recountings of folk tales with accompanying illustrations. Davis recounts specific stories but his volume is a more thorough guide to all forms of Japanese folk culture, with chapters on religious tradition and superstition, as well as separate chapters devoted to trees, thunderstorms, bells, mirrors, tea, Mount Fuji, foxes and supernatural beings. The book as a whole runs to over 500 pages, ending with a number of contextual appendices. Davis also lists his sources (Lafcadio Hearn, for one) which you don’t usually find in books of this type. Two of the illustrations show characters from Kwaidan, Hearn’s ghost-story collection: the sinister Lady of the Snow, and the hapless musician Hoichi the Earless.

Evelyn Paul’s illustrations strive to balance the traditional elements of ukiyo-e print-making with the watercolour style that was a common feature of illustrated books at this time. The combination doesn’t always work as well as it might—the nebulosity of watercolour painting runs counter to the definition and flatness of woodcut prints—but her illustrations still look more Japanese than European. To be fair to the artist, colour printing using photo separations was still in its infancy in 1912, and Paul’s paintings seem muddier in reproduction than they might have been in their original state. Davis’s book was published by Harrap, Harry Clarke’s London publisher, and you find similar deficiences in the reproduction of Clarke’s paintings.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrator’s archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fifteen ghosts and a demon
• Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai
• Yoshitoshi’s ghosts
• Miwa Yanagi’s fairy tales
• Kwaidan
• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

Weekend links 791

Cover design by Marian Bantjes for a 2009 series of Nabokov reprints.

• “It is quite unlike the bland featurelessnesses of the current fiction in which dull creative writing students chat to dull creative writing students (there is today a generalised fear of imaginative invention and giving offence).” Jonathan Meades on late style and Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things.

• Cathi Unsworth remembers the late Roger K. Burton, founder of London’s unique exhibition and venue space, The Horse Hospital.

• New music: by Pan American & Kramer; Glass Colored Lilly by Yuki Fujiwara.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – August 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix 307 by On-U Sound.

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke chooses 10 great Eastern European science-fiction films.

• At The Wire: David Toop and Ania Psenitsnikova on moving beyond music and dance.

• At Colossal: Weird Buildings celebrates architects who think outside the box.

• Verbal #12 includes new fiction by Michael Moorcock, among others.

• At Unquiet Things: Exquisite incantations in clay by Forest Rogers.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Experimo.

• Dale Cornish’s favourite albums.

• Tenth Letter of the Alphabet

• Ecstasy Symphony/Transparent Radiation (Flashback) (1987) by Spacemen 3 | Almost Transparent Blue (1996) by David Toop | Transparent (1997) by Reflection

Engulfed Cathedrals

La cathédrale engloutie by Claude Debussy. From Préludes pour Piano (1910).

• La cathédrale engloutie performed by Daniel Barenboim.

The Submerged Cathedral (1929) by MC Escher.

La cathédrale engloutie (1950) by Ithell Colquhoun.

La cathédrale engloutie III (1960) by Ceri Giraldus Richards.

La cathédrale engloutie (1968) by Luc Simon.

Snowflakes Are Dancing (aka Clair De Lune) (1974) by Tomita.

• Track 6: The Engulfed Cathedral (Preludes, Book 1, No. 10).

Escape From New York (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1981) by John Carpenter In Association With Alan Howarth.

• Track 4: Engulfed Cathedral.

Re:Sort (2003) by Sora.

• Track 4: La Cathédrale Engloutie.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• L’après-midi d’un faune
• Hokusai record covers
• Tomita album covers

Akihiro Yamada’s Lovecraftiana

Akihiro Yamada is a Japanese illustrator and manga artist best known for his work in the sub-genre of historical fantasy, as well as character design for video games and other media. All of this art is very accomplished—he’s great with lengths of billowing fabric—while giving no hint at all of his earlier detours into cosmic horror. I’ve been familiar for some time with a couple of his covers in the “Cthulhu” series (c. 1988–1993) but hadn’t gone looking for the entire run until now. Doing so turned up another series of books published in the early 2000s by Kurodahan Press, Lairs of the Hidden Gods, with a quartet of covers in which the traditional Japanese print-making theme of the four seasons is given a demonic twist. All of these books are reprints of stories by Lovecraft and other writers, past and present, with the Kurodahan series being introduced by Robert M. Price. The artwork, meanwhile, is very different in style to Yamada’s more recent output, to an extent that you wouldn’t connect these covers with his fantasy illustrations without seeing a credit.

I’ve long been curious about Japanese representations of the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft’s fiction has obvious attractions for the Japanese imagination but the art used by Japanese publishers doesn’t always travel overseas unless the artists themselves capture the attention of aficionados in other countries. ISFDB is a very useful resource but it’s still lacking when it comes to the listing of foreign editions. There’s more out there to be discovered.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive