Category: Look Here

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: ENCHANTED PILGRIMAGE and three others with cover art by Lehr

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More cover scans, courtesy of yours truly:

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The art on the cover of Freezing Down is uncredited, and no signature is visible, but I’m going to go ahead and attribute it to Paul Lehr. If you know better, you are welcome to post a comment and set the record straight.

Keywords: Freezing Down by Anders Bodelsen, The Ramsgate Paradox by Stephen Tall, Enchanted Pilgrimage by Clifford D. Simak, The Best SF 73 edited by Harry Harrison and Briwn W. Aldiss, Paul Lehr.

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Look Here: Five covers, five couples

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Of the following five covers — all scanned from the dusty, diverse paperback collection of yours truly — only one, A House Divided from Pocket Books, includes a formal illustrator credit, and the lucky artist is/was… wait for it… Jim Avati!

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The best of the bunch: A House Divided and The Farmers Hotel. IMHO, of course!

Keywords: Smouldering Fires by Anya Seton, Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes, The Finding of Jasper Holt by Grace Livingston Hill, The Farmers Hotel by John O’Hara, A House Divided by Pearl S. Buck.

Comics · Here, Read · Look Here

Look Here, Read: “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” with art by the great unknown

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From Calling All Girls #10 (September 1942), here’s “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” with script and art both by the great unknown:

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Whoever the artist is here, he or she was in full command of a lovely, loose style that, more than thirty years later, George Freeman of Captain Canuck and Jack of Hearts fame might have envied.

BONUS:

Here are the first five pages of Jack of Hearts #2 (February 1984)…

… along with the last page of the final issue, Jack of Hearts #4 (April 1984), which may or may not have been inked by Freeman, though it is in his style:

Really wish I had some Captain Canuck scans handy I could post… would make the point clearer, I think…

Barry Windsor-Smith · Connections · Illustration Art · Look Here

Connections: Gustave Doré and Barry Windsor-Smith

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BONUS INFO:

In The Studio (Dragon’s Dream, 1979), on pages 103 and 104, Barry Windsor-Smith provides a brief account of the genesis of Whithering:

“In the spring of 1975 I was working on a pen and ink drawing of trees, just trees. It was inspired, in part, by a wonderful painting of old Hampstead Heath by John Constable. At that time I didn’t think my audience was ready for — or let’s say interested in — a new work by me that was ‘just trees.’ Constable himself had a witticism about painting some of his pictures with ‘eye salve.’ What he meant was that he would make a picture as commercial as possible if he needed to sell it. As I wanted the fantasy market to see my tree drawing, I took a tip from Constable and applied a little ‘fantastic eye balm’: right in the middle of the picture I drew a shrouded figure of Death — a skull-headed man — and off in the distance a dark, foreboding mansion. This made the trees seemingly incidental. I called it Whithering (p. 110)… a deliberate non sequitur.” […]

“One night I got a frenzied call from an associate in London. He’d just shown a reproduction of the picture to a much respected fellow artist whom I’d never met, and whom my associate had only just met. Over the crackling transatlantic line I heard him say, ‘Hey! Guess what!… I just showed Whithering to so-and-so and guess what he said, — ‘Ahh, Constable; those trees. Barry just stuck that dead bloke in there so he could get away with drawing trees, didn’t he’?… He knew! There were a few cackles of laughter and then he hung up; that was the end of the call. I was suffering from insomnia at the time, I recall I slept that night and glowed the next day.”

Does Windsor-Smith’s reminiscence rule out the influence of Doré’s composition on Whithering? I don’t think so, but if you check out the comments section of this post, you’ll find a reader who disagrees with me.

BONUS IMAGES:

Three paintings of “Hampstead Heath” by John Constable:

Bill Draut · Comics · Here, Read · Look Here

Look Here, Read: “Honeymooners — Not Wanted!” with art by Bill Draut

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Time for more comics, I think. This time around, we’ve got “Honeymooners — Not Wanted!” from Young Romance #49 (vol. 6, no. 1); neither the script nor the art are credited in the comic, and comics.org hasn’t indexed the issue yet, but foolhardy pseudo-aficionado that I am, I’m going to go head and attribute the art, at least, to a long-time RCN favourite, Bill Draut:

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The scans are from the Digital Comics Museum, but I’ve processed them a bit for display here. What do I mean by “processed”? Scroll down to the bonus section below for a before-and-after comparison of the opening page.

BONUS IMAGES:

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Before:

After:

Worth the bother? I think so.