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Look There: Sergio Toppi Flickr set
Category: Illustration Art
Look There: Twenty-five “New Yorker” covers with art by Lorenzo Mattotti
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Look Here: The cavalcade of Jones covers continues…
Here are three more covers with art by Jeffrey Jones, scanned from the copies I have on hand at RCN headquarters here in the Queen City and posted below in order of publication:
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You can see the photo reference for the first cover — which, in terms of draughtsmanship and painting technique, I would describe as the weakest of the three, though I do find the composition interesting — on Jeffrey Jones’s official Web site. It’s the first image on this page, right beside the figure reference for the painting Age of Innocence.
The N. C. Wyeth influence is pretty obvious in Jones’s Nine Princes cover — see, for instance, Wyeth’s paintings for Robin Hood, etc. Years later, Jones revisited the idea of the knight on horseback in his Game of Thrones painting. Notice how the Wyeth influence is no longer right on the surface in the later painting but has been absorbed and transformed into a style that is less about trying on techniques and motifs like pieces of clothing and more about the pleasure of manipulating and thinking in paint.
Heads Up: A new, expanded hardcover edition of “Deathbird Stories” by Harlan Ellison
I don’t have the new edition Harlan Ellison’s classic, award-winning short-story collection yet — click here to visit the publisher’s site, where you’ll find a small scan of the new cover art by Tom Kidd, a.k.a Gnemo — but I do have the following paperback from 1990, with cover art by Jim Burns:
Here are the details about the new edition as posted in the catalogue on the publisher’s Web site:
Deathbird Stories
by Harlan Ellison
(preorder–to be published in December)Dust Jacket by Gnemo.
Lettered: $500
Limited: $125
ISBN: 978-1-59606-084-5Trade: $45
ISBN: 978-1-59606-085-2Length: 416 pages
Subterranean Press is proud to present the expanded, definitive edition of Harlan Ellison’s landmark collection of stories, in an oversize hardcover edition.
SOME BOOKS BECOME CLASSICS
For more than three decades this singular collection of stories in which the New Gods of freeways, and slot machines, internal combustion deities and evil so enormous that it swallows the streets in shadow, for more than thirty years the power of this book has compelled the attention of not only readers of imaginative bent, but the praise of hard-line literary critics. One cannot codify modern literature of the fantastic without including a reference or selection from this dark book of godly and troubling stories that will not be ignored.
SOME WRITERS BECOME LEGENDS
Ellison. Harlan Ellison. He wrote this book midway toward the earliest acclaim of a career that now goes into sixty years. He’s still with us. the enfant terrible has become an eminence gris but the tongue remains sharp, the wit unpredictable, the manner still singular. He has outwritten and outlived his caste, and the words in this book carry the fire and truth of his career.
Lettered: 26 deluxe bound hardcovers, housed in a custom traycase
Limited: 500 signed numbered copies, slipcased, bound in leather, with illustrated endsheets by Leo & Diane Dillon
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition
Table of Contents:
* Foreword: Oblations at Alien Altars
* A Word about Time (*)
* From A to Z, in the Sarsaparilla Alphabet (*)
* The Whimper of Whipped Dogs
* Along the Scenic Route
* On the Downhill Side
* O Ye of Little Faith
* Scartaris, June 28th (*)
* Neon
* Basilisk
* The Face of Helene Bournouw
* Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38°54’N, Longitude 77°00’13’’W
* Rock God
* Bleeding Stones
* Ernest and the Machine God
* Delusion for a Dragon Slayer
* Corpse
* Shattered Like a Glass Goblin
* Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes
* Paingod
* At the Mouse Circus
* The Place With No Name
* The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore (*)
* The Deathbird
* Afterword: Moving in Mysterious Ways (*)
* A Word About the Cover Art (*)(*) Exclusive to the Expanded Edition
And here is what I found on the Amazon.ca site:
Deathbird Stories [Hardcover]
Harlan Ellison (Author)
Price: CDN$ 45.84Available for pre-order.
# Hardcover: 416 pages
# Publisher: Subterranean Press (December 2010)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1596060859
# ISBN-13: 978-1596060852
Did you know that Deathbird Stories includes a short tale that was adapted for comics, with art by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon? The story is “Along the Scenic Route,” and the adaptation first appeared in Ariel: The Book of Fantasy #3 (April 1978) and was reprinted in the more recent collection, Al Williamson Adventures (Insight Studios Group, 2003).
Look Here: Four variations on a “meaningless gesture,” by Jeffrey Jones
This post is a sequel to a previous effort that featured two Zebra-Kensington REH covers, with art by Jeffrey Jones (as usual, click the image below to view a larger version):
“After a few years in NYC a friend of mine, a great artist, much older than me, the late Roy G. Krenkel, told me that I was the Master of the Meaningless Gesture. Well, I do this in my art because I don’t want to tell anyone anything. Also in my words, like my poem. I want the people to bring themselves to the work, based on their own experience.”
— Jeffrey Jones, autobiography
Look Here: “Colour Your Dreams” and more by Jeffrey Jones
When I win, you win:
No, I didn’t win that copy of Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love from an ebay auction, but I thought you might appreciate having a scan readily available to compare with the black-and-white original art that appeared on the cover of Art Show. As you can see, it was the fact that Jones’s original black-and-white artwork was mostly continuous tone that gave the Dark Mansions cover its striking appearance, which I’d characterize as somewhere between a typical comic book cover and a hand-coloured photograph.
Look Here: Two Zebra/Kensington REH covers, with art by Jeffrey Jones
As I noted on this blog a long time ago, Jones’s paintings for Zebra Books/Kensington Publishing Corporation were one of the high points of the artist’s career as a cover artist. What I find interesting when I compare the two covers posted below, though, is the difference in Jones’s imagery and technique from one to the other. Whereas Legion from the Shadows features a rather abstractly composed fantasy battle scene delineated in thin washes of oil paint with relatively little opaque overpainting — some of the lightest lights in the painting have been created simply by wiping out the paint to expose the white ground — The Sowers of the Thunder explicitly hearkens back to the imagery and technique of James McNeill Whistler as evidenced in works such as Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony and The Artist’s Studio, both of which I’ve included below for the sake of easy comparison. Whistler and Robert E. Howard — an odd couple if ever there was one!
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The final two images above provide a comparison between the figure in the right foreground of The Sowers of the Thunder and the original art for one of the plates in Jones’s As a Child portfolio (Colchester, CT: Black Lotus, 1980).
Connections: Frazetta and Jones
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The helmeted, injured soldier in the lower left quadrant of Frank Frazetta’s Buccaneer/Destroyer painting and the helmeted, injured soldier/sailor in the lower left quadrant of Jeffrey Jones’s painting for Talbot Mundy’s The Purple Pirate are not exact copies of each other, as you can plainly see above, and yet, they do seem to share a certain family resemblance. So much so, that one might venture to guess that one of the painters has been “inspired by” the other in this detail… however, it’s not at all clear to me who was inspired by whom. Near as I can tell, the Jones cover was published first, in 1970; the Frazetta, second, in 1971. So make of that what you will…
Look Here: Three more paperback covers with art by Jeffrey Jones
Yes, more.
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I’ve looked at a lot of art by Jeffrey Jones over the years, and I have a pretty good memory for images, so I’m always surprised when I come across a Jones cover that I’ve never seen before. That’s the case with The Purple Pirate by Talbot Mundy, which just yesterday I stumbled upon among the used paperbacks at the local Value Village store. It’s unfortunate the book isn’t in better condition, but it was so cheap, and so rare, that I couldn’t pass it up in the hope of finding a better copy at some later date. There’s a sort-of Frazetta swipe on that cover, too; or maybe Frazetta sort-of swiped from Jones. (Anyone know which painting came first?) It’s the fallen soldier in the lower left of the painting. In my next post, I’ll provide a side-by-side comparison so you can see what I mean.
Look Here: Six Ace ERB covers with art by Frazetta
What’s this? My fourth post today?
Yes… yes, it is…
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Seems the designers at Ace couldn’t decide whether Ace’s 1970s reprint series of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels looked better with the art wrapped around to decorate the spine (as pictured above) or with coloured type on a white background (not pictured). No doubt, there was a lot of annoying input from marketing about which design would be more attractive on the store shelves and ultimately produce better sales…
The more elaborate Carson of Venus design is the odd man out here, I know, but since it is the last Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback with cover art by Frazetta that I have on hand, I thought I might as well throw it in as a bonus!
Ragged Claws Network 