A heads up to anyone with a hankering for some really fantastic “practical” steampunk worldbuilding and storytelling who isn’t yet familiar with FreakAngels: the first story arc of Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield’s groundbreaking webcomichas been collected in a scrumptious 144 page trade paperback. It’s available today in North America, and tomorrow in the UK and other territories. Meanwhile, all past installments of FreakAngels will remain online as a free serialized weekly. You can check them out, starting here.
As far as how it works: it’s the TV model. FreakAngels is free-to-air, but the eventual collected editions will cost money. I can watch pretty much any TV show I want, on the box or on the net, but for something I like, I’d rather have the complete DVD handy.
Yeah… in Russia we had none of that Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey shit. Penned by Pushkin in 1833, the Russian version of the classic fairy tale, morbidly titled “The Tale of the DEAD PRINCESS and the Seven Knights,” had the princess living with seven “lusty” bogatyrs. I’m sure that many a girl who grew up with this fairy tale thought to herself, “yep, this is how life should be.”
Scanned for your viewing please are some illustrations from my childhood copy of this tale – a well-worn hand-me-down originally printed in 1970 and bought for 18 kopeks (that’s 10¢), with gorgeous illustrations done in 1954 by Tamara Ufa.
There are many similarities between the Russian version (full translation of the poem here) and version that most of us grew up with, including the poisoned apple and the glass coffin. One of the most interesting differences is there’s no kiss, a far cry from the one of the earliest versions of the tale, in which the princess is actually raped and abandoned by the prince, only to be awoken by newborn children. In the Russian version, the grief-stricken prince simply throws himself onto the coffin, and the shattering of the glass is what wakes the princess. Also, it’s interesting that the princess (or Tsarina, in Russian) doesn’t have a name. In fact, the only people in the story who have names are the Tsarina’s suitor, Prince Yelisei, and Smudge, the evil queen’s chambermaid.
There was also a 1951 cartoon by Ivan Ivanov-Vano, “patriarch of Soviet Animation”:
In the late 60s and eary 70s, the Rankin/Bass production company made a slew of endearingly hokey holiday-themed “Animagic” flicks that I’m just barely old enough to remember watching in early reruns. I couldn’t have been older than seven or eight when the popularity of such saccharine-injected TV specials as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and The Year Without A Santa Claus had begun to wane. While I’m too sentimental to harsh on any of that star-studded, sticky-sweet fare, only one of their films has really stuck with me all these years later. Tellingly, that movie is Rankin/Bass’s Halloween special, Mad Monster Party, and it’s all MAD Magazine‘s fault.
Classic Mad Monster Party illustration by Frank Frazetta.
Let’s talk for one sec about MAD. Who here read it growing up? Who still does? If you did/do, I bet it’s high on the What Made You Weird list. Founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, this last gasp of the EC Comics line remained one of the most consistently clever, intelligent, and merciless satirical publications in print until at least the late 90s.* Nothing was sacred and no one was safe. Founded at a time when aggressive censorship and Cold War paranoia muted the voices of activists and humorists alike, the broadly grinning face of MAD’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, was a cheerfully innocuous “fuck you” to authority, and has remained so for generations. Honestly, I could rant and rave about the importance of MAD for hours, but it’s Halloweenie time, so I’ll shaddup for now, at least.
So! Mad Monster Party. Kurtzman and longtime MAD cartoonist Jack Davis were very hands on in writing and conceptualizing this island of classic horror movie monsters, and it shows. Appropriately, Boris Karloff loaned his voice to the character Baron Frankenstein (his final role). Phyllis Diller basically plays herself in it, which is even creepier than it sounds. One guy I know has claimed that the redheaded, husky-voiced fembot lab assistant, Francesca, gave him his first boner. Obviously, MMP influenced the hell out of Tim Burton. Studded with Forrest J. Ackerman-worthy puns and ridiculous musical numbers –including the song “Do the Mummy” performed by a skeletal Beatlesesque quartet called Little Tibia and the Fibias– MMP is campy, witty, and surprisingly risque for children’s fare… I’m pretty sure this is the only kiddie film that’s ever ended with a mushroom cloud!
Whether you’re revisiting it for the umpteenth time or watching it for the first, I hope you’ll enjoy Mad Monster Party with me on this most darque and spookylicious eve of Goth Christmas.
*I haven’t read the magazine since the late 90s, so I couldn’t honestly say if the rag’s still in top form. A lot of folks have said Mad’s gone downhill since becoming dependent on ad-revenue in 2001. The publication had been ad-free for decades until that time (beginning with issue #33 in April of 1957). It was, by a long shot, the most successful American magazine that ever published ad-free, and of course, by staying independent of ad revenue, Mad was free to tear American culture’s less savory, more materialistic aspects endless new arseholes without ever having to answer to financiers.
Laurie Lipton’s work reminds me distinctly of two artists who terrified me as a child. There was my parents’ Brueghel book, in which Triumph of Death broke my brain at age 5, and my 3rd-grade discovery of Stephen Gammell’s ink drawings in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. (Gammell also illustrated a children’s book about the Holocaust called Terrible Things, which I’ve never read, but the very idea of Gammell illustrating such a thing frightens me already.) Lipton’s hyper-detailed images of lace-wrapped ghost brides, gloating war profiteers and haunted dollhouses are mixed in with images of “ordinary” scenes such as this old man (or woman?) dining alone. In context of the other works (or perhaps, even by themselves), these images hold just as much mystery.
As if Lipton’s work isn’t scary enough, selecting images of hers for this post from her MySpace page led to the most uncanny ad moment of my distinguished internet-surfing career. Even without the corresponding image, the rectangle ad below looks more like an anorexia PSA or a Caryn Drexl photo, but finding it next to Lipton’s depressing Mirror, Mirror drawing takes it to a whole new level of creepy. Click here for the larger version. After seeing it on that one page, I never saw that ad again. Can internet ads become “possessed” by the content that surrounds them? Someone in Japan, make that movie, please.
Hooray, Halloween is almost heeeere. What better way to greet the final stretch than to wake and stretch with this bonafide monster mash, courtesy of the great master of make believe, stop-motion model animator, Ray Harryhausen? (Added bonus: Tito Puente!)
More rousting clips of Harryhausen’s creations under the cut.
San Francisco-based artist Fred Einaudi has the sort of work that makes you do a double take. You’ll find yourself wondering what it is you’re actually seeing and whether you should laugh or cry.
The subject of death is most prevalent in Einaudi’s paintings. Though gas masks, skulls and children are commonly used symbols, seeing them depicted realistically and not in the exaggerated low brow style we’re used to, lends for a provocative experience. While I wouldn’t call this work “subtle”, it is difficult to gauge just how much humor Fred tries to inject into his paintings. Whether we see a young boy poking a woman’s floating corpse with a stick, Leda getting it from her swan, or a mechanical girl hungry for canary flesh, the intent, the artist’s voice, is subdued. Fred Einaudi’s realistic, dry execution reminds me of public service announcements from a post-nuclear word.
So… Zo, Mer and I are in Issue 02 Deadline Hell. Posting’s slowed down until Issue 02 is sorted, with many thanks to our guest bloggers for keeping the fort. Later today, a very special post from copyranter involving Mexican food and toilet paper. For now, a quickie that I’ve been wanting to post for a long time: one of our paper dolls from the magazine’s back page (a tradition that will be carried over to Issue 02), fully dressed. For those of you who didn’t want to cut out the paper dolls but are still curious about how they look in their outfits, here’s 1 of 2, the lovely Juniper Fusion by artist Paul Komoda:
In every Italian railway terminal there is at least one newsstand. Invariably, physician its stock breaks down like this: half of everything is daily papers—Communist-leaning, Northern Separatist-leaning, Social Democrat-leaning, ten flavors of Berlusconi-leaning, et al.; of what remains, one third is sports-related, a third is girlie magazines (wherein the pneumatic risk pneumonia), and a third is Dylan Dog. Old issues in piles—sold and re-sold, bindings mostly broken, costing a few Euros apiece for a hundred black and white pages. This long-running horror comic, which reportedly sells half a million copies per month in Italy, is like plaque accumulating in the arteries of their national transit system.
Every issue is commute-sized: fifteen local stops long at most. First you can’t put them down, and then you throw them away. They’re like episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker by way of Arthur Conan Doyle and Dario Argento. But with a light touch. Despite all of the Jungian unpleasantness, there are plenty of wisecracks and visual gags to go around.
In the almost three hundred issues published since Tiziano Sclavi created the character in 1986, a dozen writers and illustrators have tried their hands at the series. There have been fat years and lean years creatively, but throughout it’s been the confection of choice for a whole generation of Italians with a sweet-tooth for the macabre. No less of a gray eminence than Umberto Eco once declared, “I can read the Bible, Homer, or Dylan Dog for days without being bored.”
Even when he’s drawing space vehicles, the myriad of minutiae executed with sharp precision hints at Keith Thompson’s classical influences. I’ve spent hours browsing Keith’s incredible portfolio and getting lost in the stories written for most of the art on display. The worlds behind each piece feel thoroughly conceived – it’s clear the author mulled over each detail of the fable along with the art. Gorgeous detailing decorates mutants, deities and demons, some of it recognizable, like this machine-beluga or the violin necks in the legs of the lovely musician below.
When a talented skald of the Swedish courts, renowned across Scandinavia for his unparalleled musical prowess, revealed himself as a disguised woman, she was swiftly executed, and the embarrassing events were stricken from polite conversation. Her sudden return to court functions shook even the staunchest war veterans, but not enough to stay a second wary, though swift, summary execution. Upon further returns, each revealing the scald to be strangely repaired in a manner befitting tailor more than physician, the court began to almost embrace the eerie presence. This cycle of returns and executions leading to a more and more transfigured court poet became something of an exalted tradition.
Thompson’s work is largely concept art along with two sections of illustration work with some beautifully fleshed out pieces you must see to believe. I’m not posting those here simply because of how great they look full-size. Click. Click, also. Here the old school is especially visible, with the pieces reminiscent of Arthur Rackham and Edmund DuLac – two of my childhood’s favorite illustrators. Thompson uses traditional techniques he converts to digital in the process, which is described and taught in an instructional DVD.
Keith’s galleries of Vehicles, Creatures and Undead showcase fantastic creatures, some of which take the term “Bio-mechanical” in a new direction. Perfect example: the Luxury Nautiloid below. From Keith’s attached text, some key features:
Upper observation deck used by vacationers with eyes strong enough to look up at the light shining down from the water’s surface. Huge windows offer a commanding view of the seascape from the comfort of interior dining areas and lounges.The ship can move fore or aft and when necessary these tentacles retract and the surrounding plates close up. These extended, flared muscular hydrostats are often used to pull surface craft down into the water for the amusement of the more spiteful tourists.
Beyond the jump, more art and stories from Keith Thompson. Thanks, Alice!
How intricate a mechanism the body, how elegant the curvature of a clavicle! It’s no wonder so many artists find themselves inspired by the wondrous hidden framework of living creatures. Collected below, some curious work by three jewelers, adventurous artisans who believe in extending the life of anatomical construction well beyond the years of its original owners.
Fist up, Julia Deville. Miss Deville’s biography hints at an interesting character I’d love to have over for tea. She is a trained cobbler, silversmith and taxidermist enthralled with nature and its inner workings. Fusing these areas of expertise she created her line – Disce Mori. Inspired by Victorian mourning artifacts and jewelry, Julia’s beautiful website‘s dark clockwork theme is as entrancing as her pieces. Jet is paired with silver cast from animal bones among a selection of cuff links, buttonhole adornments and fob chains alongside necklaces and bracelets. Also here are less orthodox items – a brooch featuring a preserved mouse, for instance. Bold, yet far from costume fare, Disce Mori pieces are as timeless as they are macabre. The “Taxidermy” section is small, but shows a sense of humor with its “Kitten Rug” [exactly what it sounds like]. Viewing her works as reminders to enjoy the present, Julia makes a point to mention that the animals she uses have all died of natural causes.
Follow beyond the jump for two more purveyors of life-affirming adornments.
