"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
BONUS IMAGE:
I doubt there’s a direct connection, but when I first saw the last panel in the above sequence, I was immediately reminded of the last panel of the classic opening page of ROM #1 (December 1979):
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I scanned the cover of Back to the Stone Age by Edgar Rice Burroughs, with pulse-poundin’ art by Frank Frazetta, from the copy of the paperback edition in my personal library.
Arthur Suydam’s Mammoth was published as a poster/print in both an unsigned and a signed and limited edition by Glimmer Graphics in 1990. I borrowed the image of Mammoth from the Glimmer Graphics site.
Suydam’s stories in Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated were among the best those magazines had to offer.
Frazetta, of course, is Frazetta.
BONUS IMAGES:
Perhaps those “Bonus Images” ought to have been a “Connections” post all on their own.
More covers, freshly scanned, by me, from books in my personal collection:
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BONUS IMAGE:
RELATED LINKS:
Look Here: Four Agatha Christie novels with cover art by Tom Adams
Look Here: Four more Agatha Christie novels with cover art by Tom Adams
Happy Halloween 2012 from RCN! — Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie, with art by Tom Adams
Look Here: Two Raymond Chandlers with cover art by Tom Adams
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Earlier this morning, I purchased the above paperbacks with cover art by Barron Storey from a local thrift store for a buck a piece. When I arrived home with my haul, I noticed that I had received an email from a past contributor to RCN — see Look Here, Read: “The Believer,” reconstructed by Rotomago — who had sent me scans, front and back, of THE EXACT SAME EDITION (!) of The Lord of the Flies that I had just purchased along with a JPEG of a cover with art by Chris Bachalo that apparently was intended as an homage to Storey’s iconic painting. To his credit, Rotomago had noticed the connection between the two covers on his own, but when he checked online, he found that the well-known comics site, Robot 6, among others, had beaten him (and me) to the punch. Still, I do think the connection is interesting, so I’ve decided to post the JPEG of Bachalo’s Avengers Arena cover here at RCN:
The short critique of the Bachalo’s cover that Rotomago sent to me along with the JPEG is pretty much spot on, so rather than write something myself, I’m just going to quote him:
Some current super-heroes addicts seem to find this homage very cool. Personally I’m not so enthusiastic. I find this cover representative of trendy contemporary illustration, in form and spirit, in its undecided soft aseptic lines and colours, and in its poverty of imagination, but that’s surely a question of taste.
Barron Storey’s online presence includes a blogspot that functions as an archive of old journal pages and a tumblr that Storey is in the process of filling with new journal pages.
Rotomago is a cartoonist as well as the creator of the site, Alberto Breccia Bibliografía, which, although it hasn’t been updated in a while, remains a valuable resource.
P.S. I actually own a drawing by Chris Bachalo that I’ve been meaning to scan and post, but for some reason, I’ve just never gotten around to it. Maybe this year…
P.P.S. I’ve used my own scans of Storey’s Lord of the Flies cover rather than the scans that Rotomago sent to me by email — my copy of the novel is in like-new condition; Rotomago’s copy is faded from wear and slightly damaged on the back — but I must say, if I hadn’t coincidentally just purchased my own copy, it’s Rotomago’s scans that you’d be viewing right now.
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Eerie Presents El Cid, with script by Budd Lewis and art by Gonzalo Mayo, is available now from a bookseller near you. The publisher is Dark Horse.
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Yeah, I know… there’s probably no direct connection between Ted CoConis’s stunning illustration for the cover of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and H. Rogers’ more workmanlike effort for Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft among the Jews — some design ideas are just “in the air” at certain points in history — but it is amusing to me that the cover of Nabokov’s daring and erudite literary novel, a novel which a reviewer for the New York Times described as “a love story, an erotic masterpiece, a philosophical investigation into the nature of time,” is several orders of magnitude sexier than the cover of a pulp fiction featuring “the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks.” Thus, this post:
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Ted CoConis has a JPEG of his Ada cover illustration, sans text, on display on his website. Look there!
BONUS SCAN:
The photographic cover of the movie tie-in edition of Shaft is evocative, I guess. And since I own it, I might as well scan and post it, right?
Here’s another paperback that I purchased at a recent church rummage sale:
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Now, that’s a very strong cover, no doubt, but I think that anyone who is familiar with the work of Gustav Klimt will tell you that the composition of Foster’s illustration owes a clear debt to Klimt’s Medicine (1901), a large-scale ceiling painting that was destroyed in a fire started by the Nazis and is known to us only by a black-and-white photograph of the finished work and a small colour preliminary:
Although at first glance you might be tempted to conclude that, in addition to being inspired by Klimt’s composition, Foster flat-out swiped the figure of the woman suspended in space in the upper-left-hand quadrant of Klimt’s painting, I think a closer comparison of the two figures suggests that what Foster actually did was hire his own model and instruct her to strike a pose similar to one Klimt chose for his model.
RELATED POSTS:
Ragged Claws Network > Connections: Zurbaran, Dali, Vallejo, Foster
Ragged Claws Network > Connections: Gustav Klimt and Jeffrey Jones
BONUS IMAGE (Added 21 October 2012):
Just came across an illustration (with collage elements) by Jim Steranko, published in 1970, that obviously shares a strong family resemblance with the cover illustration by Foster, published in 1968, featured above:
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BONUS IMAGE, TOO (Added 27 October 2012):
I definitely think Foster shot his own reference for the figure of the floating woman in the New Writings in SF4 cover:
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Ragged Claws Network 