John Coulthart's Blog, page 7

Weekend links 780

An early illustration by Burne Hogarth from Federal Illustrator, Winter 1931–1932, credited to the artist’s original name, Bernard Spinoza Ginsburg. (Via)

• RIP Simon House, a musician whose death was announced in the same week as news of a remixed edition of Hall Of The Mountain Grill by Hawkwind, the first of the group’s albums to feature House on violin and keyboards. House’s keyboards made a considerable difference to Hawkwind’s sound, expanding the range of their songwriting; the melodramatic scale of Assault And Battery/The Golden Void wouldn’t have been possible without those massed Mellotrons. Post-Hawkwind it was House’s violin that was sought after during his time as a session musician, on songs like Yassassin by David Bowie, and Talking Drum by Japan. He’s also one of the musicians credited on Thomas Dolby’s biggest hit, She Blinded Me With Science (violin again), although his contribution there is easy to mistake for a synthesizer.

• “We did want the name to be weighty and metal-related because it is a kind of a metal band. So what is heavy and what is metal: that was the answer.” Hildur Gudnadóttir talking about Osmium, an experimental quartet comprising Gudnadóttir with James Ginzburg, Rully Shabara and Sam Slater.

• At Criterion: Stephanie Zacharek on Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, films from a time “when delighting audiences meant more than catering to the predetermined whims of a dogged fandom”.

• The week in maps: At Public Domain Review, Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (ca. 1920 edition); at Nautilus, the first maps of the Earth’s magnetic field.

• The eleventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Not on any map: Mark Valentine describes the time he tried to buy a phantom island from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

• At Colossal: “In surreal portraits, Rafael Silveira tends to the garden of consciousness“.

• New music: Osmium by Osmium, and Along The Wind Spear by Survey Channel.

• Anne Billson chooses Anjelica Huston’s ten best roles.

• Owls in Towels

• Five Owls (1970) by Canned Heat | Night Owl (1996) by System 7 | Owls And Flowers (2006) by Belbury Poly

Fantasie di architettura by Aldo Avati

Giving a small collection of architectural designs the label “fantasies” seems an odd thing when so many building designs don’t go further than the planning stage: Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high skyscraper is as much a fantasy as the unbuilt towers of London or any of the losing designs from the world’s many architectural competitions. Fantasie di architettura: schizze e prospettive (1920) is a portfolio of 60 plates by Aldo Avati, an architect and stage designer from Bologna whose designs are more fanciful than overtly fantastic. The introductory note refers to “the magician Piranesi” whose architectural caprices, especially his Carceri d’Invenzione, cast long shadows across all the arts. Piranesi’s influence is certainly evident here, in the views through huge ramparts and stone arches, the flights of stairs and dramatic lighting. Some of the views wouldn’t be out of place in this collection of drawings and paintings by an earlier generation of Italian stage designers.

Note: Although the book is titled “Part One” there doesn’t seem to have been a part two.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The other Carceri
• Fantaisies Architecturales by Henri Mayeux
• Temples for Future Religions by François Garas

The Twilight Magus

Presenting my latest cover for Aconyte’s Arkham Horror line, and the third and final book in a trilogy by Tim Pratt.

Carl Sanford, once the Silver Twilight Lodge’s great leader and now presumed dead, lives in anonymity in Spain, plotting revenge against those who betrayed him. Alone, he calculates his first move to achieve power abroad is by being initiated into the mysterious ancient society called the Red Coterie to secretly take it over. Despite Sanford’s reputation, the Red Coterie demands proof of his occult prowess, sending him on a quest to vanquish The Blood Moon, a reclusive blood magus manipulating humans and monsters alike to achieve their own ends. As Sanford uses every scrap of cunning he possesses to outwit his enemies and prove his worth, old foes from Arkham have discovered his existence and are coming to finish him off once and for all.

The brief for this one was for a design that would continue the form of the previous two volumes while incorporating details of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, Barcelona being one of the story’s locations. I’ve admired Gaudí’s architecture for a long time but I’ve never had the opportunity to use any of it in an illustration before. Most of the details are tiny ones but the unfinished porch of the Sagrada Família is recognisable, as is the iron dragon from the entrance gate of the Park Güell. The windows behind Sarah van Shaw and Carl Sanford are also Gaudí designs.

Less recognisable, but also a Gaudí creation, is the background pattern which is more visible on the back cover of the book. My previous covers for Aconyte have all used Art Deco mofits to complement stories set in the 1920s, with several of them having elaborate background patterns. The Gaudí design was one I hadn’t seen before, a hexagonal tile in which portions of three organic forms—starfish, ammonite and algae—become whole when the tiles are placed together. It’s a beautifully simple and clever design with the additional bonus for this cover of creating a series of spirals and tendrils which suit the Lovecraftian nature of the story. If you search around you’ll find a number of places selling reproductions as either ceramic tiles or coasters in a variety of materials.

The Twilight Magus will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 779

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.

• At Blissblog, Simon Reynolds looks back on 20 years of limited-edition electronic music reissues by the Creel Pone label. (Previously.) A bootleg enterprise but a very worthwhile one since most of the reissues would otherwise remain deleted and largely forgotten. I thought the releases had finished years ago but it seems not, Discogs now lists over 300 of them.

• “Everyone recognized the brilliance of Robinson’s eventual script: they just didn’t want to make it.” David Cairns on the miserable magnificence of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I.

• Coming soon from Top Shelf: More Weight: A Salem Story, Ben Wickey’s illustrated account of the Salem Witch Trials.

• The ninth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• At Colossal: “A unique portfolio of Hilma af Klint’s botanical drawings communes with nature’s spiritual side”.

• At Nautilus: The Visual Language of Crystals—Chemistry becomes art in Thomas Blanchard’s timelapse video.

• At Unquiet Things: Supernatural field notes and incomprehensible eldritch frequencies: The art of Ed Binkley.

• See some of the entries from the 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year.

• New music: Instruments by Water Damage, and Reverie by Deaf Center.

• The Strange World of…Editions Mego.

• Strobe Crystal Green (1971) by Gil Mellé | Crystal Leaves (1983) by Ippu-Do | Crystalline Green (2002) by Goldfrapp

Ulrich Eichberger album covers

El Condor Pasa (Paul Nero In South-America) (1970) by Paul Nero Sounds.

It’s the groovy look again. Since compiling a list of artists and designers working in this post-psychedelic style I keep finding practictioners I hadn’t noticed before. German designer and art director Ulrich Eichberger is someone I might have spotted earlier if I’d examined his discography, especially when several of the albums he worked on are ones I’ve owned for many years. The covers of those albums aren’t very psychedelic, however, and don’t even look like the work of the same designer until you scrutinise the credits. The examples here are those where he was working as a cover artist as well as designer, favouring the ones where the pop-psych hallmarks are in evidence: vivid colours, bold outlines, and faces or figures treated to various degrees of stylisation. Elsewhere, the influence of Heinz “Yellow Submarine” Edelmann may be seen in the watercolour blooms that fill the backgrounds. Most of these designs are for the German wing of United Artists Records (or its Liberty affiliate) which means that Eichberger got to work for two of the major German groups of the early 70s, Can and Amon Düül II.

Partyrausch – Das Ideale Tanzalbum 70/71 (1970) by Various Artists.

Tago-Mago (1971) by Can.

I’ve never thought this was a very good cover but it’s the most popular album of those listed here.

Partyrausch 71/72 (Das Ideale Tanzalbum) (1971) by Various Artists.

In The Groove (1972) by Charly Antolini.

Included mainly because of the title.

Portrait (1972) by Jean-Luc Ponty.

The Black Voice (1972) by Don Adams.

The birds and the watercolour backgrounds are very Edelmann. The same goes for the album below.

Wide Open (1973) by Rhythm Combination & Brass, Peter Herbolzheimer.

Progressive German Pop Experience 2 (1973) by Various Artists.

Vibrations (1973) by Love Generation.

Das Hohelied Salomos (1975) by Popol Vuh.

A hippy Garden of Eden in a Rousseau style.

Lemmingmania (1975) by Amon Düül II.

An excellent compilation album which collects all the exclusive numbers from the group’s early singles. The first vinyl releases had the black graphics printed on silver foil. Eichberger used a similar foil treatment for the cover of Soon Over Babaluma by Can.

Cosmic Kraut Hits (Rock Aleman) (1976) by Various Artists.

“Krautrock” was a snarky term invented in the early 70s by the snarkiest writers in the world—Anglophone music journalists—but it persisted long enough for the German groups stuck with the label to start using it themselves. There’s no way of knowing whether its use here is ironic or not, as it often was with the groups themselves. The same goes for the Starfighter aircraft flying on the front and back cover, a notoriously unstable US plane whose adoption by the German air force resulted in so many crashes it inspired a Robert Calvert solo album (also on United Artists), Captain Lockheed And The Starfighters.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich horrors

The Seal of Yog-Sothoth, or Old Whateley’s conception of the same. A detail from the delightful kitchen autopsy scene which you’ll find below.

My thanks to Tentaclii for bringing the following to my attention in the most recent HPLinks post. The Actual Anatomy of the Terrible: Gou Tanabe, Weird Ekphrasis, and the History of Lovecraft in Comics is a lengthy academic essay by Timothy Murphy which I doubt I would have seen otherwise. Since Lovecraftian comics is the subject, a combination of vanity and curiosity made me click the link to see whether any of my own work rated a mention. I was surprised to find much more than this, with Murphy discussing and contextualising my adaptations of The Haunter of the Dark and The Call of Cthulhu. The bulk of his essay concerns the series of doorstop adaptations that Gou Tanabe has been producing for the past decade (most of which I’ve only seen as extracts), but Murphy’s knowledge of both Lovecraft’s fiction and comics history is very thorough. Particular attention is paid to Alberto Breccia’s pioneering adaptations of the 1970s; Breccia’s version of The Dunwich Horror was the story that impressed me the most when it appeared in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special in October 1979. Seeing someone approach Lovecraft’s fiction in a sober, realistic manner was a welcome riposte to the jokey EC formula, and very much in my mind when I decided to start adapting Lovecraft myself seven years later.

Previous hauntings: Caermaen Books (1988), Oneiros (1999), Creation Oneiros (2006).

The biggest surprise in Murphy’s essay (and the reason for my writing all of this) was the end of his appraisal when he says “Lovecraft devotees may regret Coulthart’s abandonment of further adaptations…”, referring to my own version of The Dunwich Horror which stalled in late 1989 when I was asked to start working on the Lord Horror comics series from Savoy Books. A few Dunwich pages and panels were included in my Haunter of the Dark book, most of them in collage form, but the bulk of the story has never been made public. In one of those striking coincidences that often occur when you’ve embarked on a new project, I happened to have resumed work on The Dunwich Horror only a week ago, 36 years after leaving page no. 25 in its pencilled form. A few weeks prior to this I’d been scanning all of my Lovecraft comic art for the new edition of the Haunter of the Dark that I’ve been preparing since January. I’ve already mentioned reworking some of the illustrations from the first edition of the book but this process has scaled up considerably in the past two months. I’d been a little mortified to find that the artwork scans I used for the slightly upgraded edition in 2006 were the same ones I made in 1999 using a desktop scanner that wasn’t as good as those I’ve had since. Sorting through all the artwork again reminded me that my adaptation of The Dunwich Horror had been abandoned very near the end, with only the last two parts of the ten-part story left unfinished. This in turn prompted me to seriously consider finishing the story at last, an idea I’d always dismissed as being difficult if not impossible. My work on the Lord Horror comics in the 1990s led to a change in my penmanship and working methods which meant abandoning the very fine (0.2 mm) Rotring Variant pen that I’d used for drawing all the Lovecraft comics. I still have all my old Rotring pens; what I no longer have is the desire to spend months covering sheets of A3-size paper with lines like those made by an etching needle.

The Dunwich Horror title page, 1988. I opened the story with a suggestion that Old Whateley’s breeding experiments had been attempted before with less successful results.

The key to revisiting the story came four years ago when I redrew the R’lyeh panorama from The Call of Cthulhu, a digital version done at the same size and with the same amount of detail as the lost/stolen/destroyed/eaten-by-Shoggoths original. (See this post.) This endeavour also took a great deal of time but it’s much easier shading with a Wacom stylus and a large computer screen, especially when you can zoom in and out of all the details. The process proved to my satisfaction that I could replicate my old drawing style in the new medium without punishing my eyesight. And I’d also managed to resurrect a drawing whose loss had been a continual aggravation since 1994. Leaving The Dunwich Horror unfinished had been a similar, if less painful, aggravation, but looking at the artwork again a few weeks ago I could at last see a way to finish the story.

Wilbur Whateley, from one of the completed Dunwich Horror pages, 1989.

This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish since I always have to attend to paid illustration and design work before anything else. The new Haunter of the Dark will be much closer to my original conception of the book as I first conceived it in 1986, when the idea was to present three stories in comic-strip form together with a few one-off illustrations. After contributing to various story collections over the past 20 years I have a lot more Lovecraft-related illustration to choose from than I would have done in the 1980s. And since the gradual reworking has turned into a full-blown reconceptualisation I’ve decided to enlarge the page size (from Executive to A4) and give the book a new title, The Haunter of the Dark and Other Weird Tales. The original subtitle “…and Other Grotesque Visions” was a suggestion by the first publisher, Oneiros, and not one I was especially happy with, but “Other Weird Tales” wouldn’t have suited a book containing a mere two stories. “Weird Tales” acknowledges the magazine that first published those stories while also using one of my favourite Old English words. “Weird” has a further resonance in relation to the artwork which I always wanted to have the texture of old engraved illustrations. Edward Gorey said he liked engravings because of their weirdness, that quality they have of being realistic representations which only need a slight nudge to become strange or (as Max Ernst demonstrated) surreal.

A new cover design, 2025.

The contents of the new edition will be as follows:

• The Haunter of the Dark ( with rescanned artwork)
• The Call of Cthulhu (with rescanned halftone artwork from The Starry Wisdom)
• The Dunwich Horror (the completed story)
• The Great Old Ones by Alan Moore (with rescanned drawings and reworked digital art)
• The Spawn of the Stars (a Cthulhu portfolio)
• Strange Aeons (a Lovecraftian art portfolio)

The Cthulhu pages are now as good as I can get them for reproductions at this size. Since the artwork was lost (or stolen or whatever…) I’ve always had to resort to compromise by reusing the printed halftone pages from The Starry Wisdom collection or the rougher photocopies I made of the originals before they were posted into oblivion. The new pages are a combination of the halftones and the photocopies, with the latter providing the lettering panels which are less readable in their halftoned form. And the new R’lyeh panorama is now installed in place of the old version. I’m currently thinking about relettering all the comics pages using a digital font based on my 1986 letterforms but this would be a serious chore which I’m putting off for the moment. A more important—and more enjoyable—task is finishing The Dunwich Horror.

For the past two weeks I’d been wondering whether to write anything about all this activity; Timothy Murphy’s piece forced my hand. The coincidence I’ll take as encouragement, one of those synchronicities which make you feel your course is true. You’ll be hearing more of this.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 778

Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (c. 1470–75) by Martin Schongauer.

• “Physique was a response to restrictions and laws that kept photographers on a short leash, and what made it lively was they were constantly pulling at that leash.” Vince Aletti discussing Physique, his new book about the history of homoerotic photography. There’s more homoerotica at the latest Vallots After Dark art auction.

• Mentioned here before, but I was reminded of the place last week: 366 Weird Movies, “Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!”

• “When the gods and goddesses of the great religions first emerged, they came into a world already populated with daimons.” David Gordon White on the many lives of Eurasian daimonology.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Studio Electrophonique: The Sheffield Space Age From The Human League To Pulp.

• At Public Domain Review: Gilded Fish—Illustrations from Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780).

• SFJAZZ Digital Media Archive: “…over 2,000 recordings of jazz, world, folk, and roots artists”.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2025 at Ambientblog.

• New music: Lake Deep Memory by Pye Corner Audio.

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

• Ella Guru (1970) by Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band | Ella Megalast Burls Forever (1988) by Cocteau Twins | Ella (1996) by Faust

Gahan Wilson’s Diner

Gahan Wilson’s macabre humour has provided stories for film and television on a number of occasions but this very short entry is the only one I’ve seen so far. Gahan Wilson’s Diner seems closest to Wilson’s work as a cartoonist, being an attempt to faithfully translate the style of his drawings and their grotesque predicaments to the world of animation. Wilson wrote and designed the film, the direction is credited to Graham Morris and Karen Peterson. Watch it here.

Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne

Aholibah (1928).

You won’t find Harry Clarke’s illustration for Swinburne’s Aholibah in Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne even though it was intended for the book, and was the illustration that Clarke deemed his favourite of the series. The erotic nature of the drawing was too much for the publisher so Clarke had to content himself by pasting a reproduction in his own copy. The copy above has been scanned from Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art; everything below is from the published Swinburne collection which turned up recently at the Internet Archive.

Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne was Clarke’s last illustrated book, published in 1928, three years before his untimely death. Of all the major Clarke books that appeared during the artist’s lifetime it’s always been the most difficult to find. Some of the drawings have been reprinted in recent collections but never the book itself. As with Clarke’s Faust, the erotic and morbid qualities of the illustrations generated disquiet outside the publisher’s office, with Humbert Wolfe in the book’s introduction stating that Clarke’s interpretations were completely opposed to his own. Given the erotic and morbid preoccupations of the poet and his work this surprises me; Swinburne’s poetry was admired by Aleister Crowley and HP Lovecraft, among others. They weren’t reading him because he was writing paeans to daffodills.

My earlier mention of this volume included a link to a defunct blog with a collection of the illustrations separated from the text. This was unavoidable at the time, there wasn’t anywhere else that you could see all of them in one place. But seeing the illustrations with the poems benefits the drawings as well as the verse, especially when the poems themselves aren’t so familiar. For my part it’s also good to see all of the illustrations, being the owner of a first edition which I bought many years ago only to discover that a couple of the best pictures had been carefully removed with a razor. This is a common problem with old illustrated books. Caveat emptor as always.

Clarke didn’t do many double-page illustrations. This is one of his best.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke record covers
• Thomas Bodkin on Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art
• Harry Clarke and others in The Studio
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Harry Clarke in colour
• The Tinderbox
• Harry Clarke and the Elixir of Life
• Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke
• Modern book illustrators, 1914
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Weekend links 777

The Seven Wonders of the World (1886). 1: Lighthouse on the Island of Pharos, Alexandria; 2: Statue of the Olympian Jupiter; 3: The Colossus at Rhodes; 4: The Temple of Diana at Ephesus; 5: The Mausoleum of Artemisia; 6: The Pyramids of Egypt; 7: The Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

• “The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined.” Nikhil Mahant on the many possible forms of alien language.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (translated by Basil Creighton).

• At Alan Moore World: A new interview with Mr Moore about Long London, magic and the future of humanity.

• New music: The Reverent Sky by Steve Roach; and Contrary Motion by Scanner & Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Tangled Dürer: The Six Knots (ca. before 1521).

• At The Daily Heller: A Typographer’s Mother Goose by Louise Fili.

• At Colossal: Woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jud Yalkut’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Steve Aylett.

• Seven And Seven Is (1966) by Love | Seven By Seven (1973) by Hawkwind | Seven, Seven, Seven (1995) by Money Mark