Category: Book/Magazine Covers (Jones)

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Look Here: Two Zebra/Kensington REH covers, with art by Jeffrey Jones

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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).

Keywords: Bran Mak MOrn, The Sowers of the Thunder, Legion from the Shadows.

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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…

Keywords: The Buccaneer, The Purple Pirate Talbot Mundy, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter.

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Look Here: Three more paperback covers with art by Jeffrey Jones

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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.

Keywords: The Big Ball of Wax, The Purple Pirate, The Stealer of Souls.

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Look Here: Three fanzine covers, with art by Jeffrey Jones

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My apologies in advance to a certain frequent visitor to this blog who is tired of my ongoing series of posts featuring the art of Jeffrey Jones, but I rescued these zine cover scans from three auctions that ended yesterday, and just had to share them:

In a promotional clip for the forthcoming documentary, Better Things: Life + Choices of Jeffrey Jones, that used to be available for viewing on the documentary’s official Web site, Michael Kaluta talked about the galvanizing impact the painting that appeared on the cover for Trumpet #8 had on him and his friends, but it looks like a fairly routine student effort to me. I guess you had to be there…

Book/Magazine Covers (Jones) · Ebay Win · Jeffrey "Jeff" Catherine Jones

Ebay Win: Various publications with art by Jeffrey Jones

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Yesterday, I won an ebay auction for 12 items with art by Jeffrey Jones, some of which I already own, but the majority of which I don’t. Here’s the list that was provided by the seller, followed by the auction images (although, of course, I intend to post better scans once I have the items in hand):

8 paperback books with Jeffrey Jones cover paintings

The Planet Wizard by John Jakes
Day of Beasts by John Muller
The Dirdir by Jack Vance
Swords in the Mist by Fritz Leiber
Dark Planet by Hunter
Uncharted Stars by Andre Norton
Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny

The paperbacks vary in condition. Most are decent. Some have surface wear, and corner bumps. [….]

The two tabloid issues of ART SHOW from 1977 and 1978. #1 has Jones art inside and #2 has the DARK MANSION OF FORBIDDEN LOVE cover printed from the original art. This is what the painting actually looks like. The color was added photographically for the printed comic book.

Jeff Jones postcard from a privately printed set from around 1974 which included Frank Frazetta, STEVE HARPER, Mike Nally, and Norman Lindsay.

COLOUR YOUR DREAMS — with Jones covers and one image inside. Also inside are drawings by Kaluta, Wrightson (a very early Frankenstein piece), Barry Smith, Fujitake, Dave Cochrum, Roy Krenkel, and others. Nice portfolio — 32 pages. Published in 1972.

YOU NEED NOT BOTHER CLICKING THE IMAGES BELOW;
THEY’RE ALREADY DISPLAYED AT FULL SIZE.
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET.

Regular visitors to RCN may recall that I already own and have posted scans of four out of eight of the paperbacks pictured above; the other four, however, will be new to this site, assuming they are in good enough condition to produce a decent scan. But that being said, the main reason I bid on the lot is to get the postcard, the two issues of Art Show, and the Colour Your Dreams portfolio publication.

All of which is to say: Jones fans, you have something to look forward to here at RCN in a couple of weeks!

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Look Here: “Tower of the Medusa,” with art by Jeffrey Jones

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Here’s another justly forgotten Lin Carter novel, half of an “Ace Double,” with cover art mistakenly credited on the verso of the title page to Kelly Freas even though the art is clearly signed “Jones”:

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Keywords: Tower of the Medusa.

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Look Here: “Wolfling”/”Conan” art by Jeffrey Jones

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This past weekend, I finally located (and purchased) a copy of Gordon R. Dickson’s Wolfling, with cover by Jeffrey Jones, so now, at last, I can post this comparison of two very similar images by Jones executed in two different mediums, oil vs. ink:

The “Conan” frontispiece was published in Savage Sword of Conan in 1975, but the style and the signature suggest to me that it was created around the time of the 1969 Wolfling cover. Anyone know if the “Conan” frontispiece was published anywhere else prior to its appearance in Savage Sword?

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Look Here: “The W. C. Fields Book” cover by Jeffrey Jones

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The W. C. Fields Book (Brooklyn: Wonderful Publishing Company, 1973) is identified in the indicia as a “special issue of Witzend (No. 9).” Witzend was an underground comics magazine launched in 1966 by E.C. legend Wallace Wood and published and edited by him until 1968, when he sold the magazine, for a buck, to Bill Pearson/Wonderful Publishing Company. Here’s the cover with Jones’s painting of W. C. Fields, which, by the way, is reprinted at a small size but sans text and in full colour on page 64 of Jones’s first solo art book, Yesterday’s Lily (Dragon’s Dream, 1980):

jeffrey-jones_cover_witzend-09

And here — SURPRISE! — is an extremely obscure illustration by Jeffrey Jones, published in black-and-white in National Lampoon, vol. 1, no. 23 (February 1972), along with an article entitled “The Thoughts of Chairman Fu-Manchu”; the painting has never, to my knowledge, been reprinted:

jeffrey-jones_the-thoughts-of-chairman-fu-manchu_national-lampoon-v1n23-feb1972_p66

The washy, rub-out style of the “Fu-Manchu” painting, which can be accomplished most easily with oil paints but is also possible in watercolour/gouache, was state-of-the-art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Three of the best known practitioners were Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame inductees Bernie Fuchs, Burton Silverman, and David Levine, but many others tried their hands at it, too — including Jones, apparently. To learn how to do it in watercolour, all you need is a copy of Silverman’s Breaking the Rules of Watercolor, a selection of watercolour paints and brushes, a few rolls of good-quality paper towels, a large tube of white gouache, a stack of the heaviest weight Strathmore plate bristol you can find, AND THE PATIENCE OF JOB!

BONUS CONTENT:

Here’s an album cover, not by Jeffrey Jones, with a portrait of W. C. Fields that appears likely to have been based on the same photo reference of Fields as Jones used for his painting; the accoutrements are slightly different in the two portraits, but the face, I think, is a dead giveaway:

w-c-fields-his-only-recording

I suppose it’s also possible that one portrait was based on the other (though it seems to me unlikely). Either way, however, Jones’s W. C. Fields genuinely looks like the kind of man who keeps a supply of stimulant handy in case he sees a snake, which he also keeps handy, while the other Fields looks like he has been living for days on nothing but food and water. Can you guess which one I like best? Wrong again. I prefer Jones’s version.