"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"
ComiCrazys has posted twelve Hey Look! single-page comic strips (in colour) and nine Mad covers (also in colour) by the late, great Harvey Kurtzman for your viewing enjoyment, but they don’t have this one:
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).
Here’s a 10-page story by Spanish comics artist and illustrator Fernando Fernandez that was published in the collection, Son of Heavy Metal, in 1984:
Although I wish the story amounted to more than a poorly thought out variation on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I do admire how the bold contrasts and the variety of illustration techniques on display here give the story such an opulent, even decadent, feeling. As I recall, several other Spanish artists, including fan-favourite Jose Gonzalez (1939–2009), used to switch back and forth between mediums in the stories they drew for Vampirella, although in black and white, the effect is somewhat different.
In a couple of spots, Fernandez’s work reminds me of Bill Sienkiewicz’s painted comics, but I have no idea whether Sienkiewicz would count Fernandez as an influence. Maybe, maybe not.
———-
Born in Spain on 07 February 1940, Fernando Fernandez passed away in Barcelona this past summer, on 09 August 2010, at the age of 70.
From Arcade volume 1, number 5 (Spring 1976), here’s a comic two-page comic by the incomparable M. K. Brown:
Click here to read “Self-Portrait” in colour online. Lots of other M. K. Brown comics on that site as well, so be sure to take a look around! You won’t regret it.
I went looking for a book collection of M. K. Brown’s comics to light up my life, but I couldn’t find one. My conclusion: this is not the best of all possible worlds.
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
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.
Well, after much deliberation, I have decided to fold the RCN categories “Swipe, Homage, or Happenstance?” and “Call and Response” into a catch-all called “Connections.” I doubt very many people will notice the difference or care — no posts have been deleted; they’ve just been recategorized — but I thought it might be polite, and possibly helpful to those that do care, to draw attention to the change.
I suppose I should also mention that I’ve now set WordPress to close comments on old topics after 30 days. The previous policy here at RCN was to leave the comments on all topics open indefinitely in the hope of attracting a few words of polite comment and/or encouragement. Since that hasn’t worked out — fact is, the only visitors to this blog who think it’s cool to post in old topics are link spammers — I’ve decided to experiment with the new setting in the hope that it will at least reduce the amount of spam cleanup that I have to do each week.
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!
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
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).
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
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…
Ragged Claws Network 