Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
Epic head trip by Todd, who painted several other scenes involving mariners and mythical beasts, according to Last Gasp’s Ron Turner. The ad is probably from a Krupp Mail Order Catalog.
The giant poster (20″ x 26″) was on sale fairly recently at Last Gasp Publishing, although it’s out of stock now.
(Images by appleclub and jl.incrowd)
Promotional poster showing all of the posters in the series. The Third Eye also put out a series of postcards and jigsaw puzzles with the same designs. Overall, the combination of Marvel’s illustration superpowers with the psychedelic mindset (the third eye enables metaphysical sight, in mystical traditions) was extremely successful and influential. Not all of the posters are winners (Spider-Man doesn’t really fit), and the exclusion of Steranko’s Nick Fury is unaccountable. Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four (below) is probably my favorite. You can see close-ups of most of the posters here.
You can see original Third Eye designs here.
(Images via Patrick Owsley and Cap’n’s Comics)
Heinz Edelmann (1934-2009) is most famous for his distinctive design and art direction on the Beatles-inspired Yellow Submarine (1968), but his Lord of the Rings covers—for the first German edition, translated by Margaret Carroux with help from Ebba-Margareta von Freymann—are a very close second. (Unfortunately, I could only find a larger scan of the Fellowship of the Rings cover.) There was nearly a Lord of the Rings movie starring the Beatles, if you remember.
A German paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was also published by Klett-Cotta featuring new, equally mesmerizing cover art by Edelmann, as seen below, but I’m not sure about the year: Amazon Germany has it at 1977. The books came in a slipcase featuring additional art. You can see more of the case here. Note the shifting position and condition of the ring—is that the Eye of Sauron inside?—in this edition, .
(Images via Tolkien Collection, Sci-fi-o-Rama, and Design is Fine)
My favorites:
The ad is from a 1971 Co-Ed magazine via Phoney Fresh.
Robot Totentanz, 2014. © Luca Carey
`State of the Arts’ spotlights contemporary artists who I think are pretty fucking amazing and deserve your attention.
Luca Carey is a New York City-based illustrator and comic artist who graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2013. His website is Rainbots, and he’s on Facebook and Tumblr. You can request a commission here, and you can donate here (donations of $50 or more come with an original sketch of your choosing).
2W2N: What’s your preferred medium?
CAREY: Photoshop, all day every day.
2W2N: Your work has a definite otherwordly, psychedelic flavor. Was that there from the beginning?
CAREY: It’s a little hard to say what the beginning was, but I guess I would say yes. From as far back as I can remember, I’ve been trying to make stuff that’s visually appealing while also pointing towards something shocking or transcendent.
Reverie, 2014. © Luca Carey
2W2N: Who are some artists you admire, visual or otherwise?
CAREY: Beksinski, Moebius, and Ashley Wood are probably my favorite artists. Music is possibly the most important thing, though, as it’s next to impossible for me to do anything without it. I especially admire artists like Susumu Hirasawa and Helium Vola because their sound captures the perfect mix of chaos and harmony.
2W2N: You did the outstanding cover art for the new Dan Terminus album The Wrath of Code (Blood Music, 2015), which is how I found you. What other projects do you have coming up?
CAREY: I’m working on a couple of other album covers, actually; one for a new synthwave project called Virtua Cult. I’m in the very slow process of writing a book, also, that I will eventually illustrate. As I like to remind myself, it’s pretty small at the moment, but not small enough to quit or forget about.
2W2N: What kind of commissions will you consider? Can we buy prints of your work?
CAREY: I’ll consider anything that pays well, is interesting, and isn’t closely associated with any kind of deeply illegal or immoral enterprise! I’m actually quite fortunate to have a style that gives me a lot of freedom; no one is writing me to commission stock illustrations, for example. I take print orders from my Facebook page at the moment, and I plan on setting up a little store on my website at some point, but first I have to get my printer fixed.
Hyperbolic Exchange of Telekinetic Body Fluids From Our Friends on Planet Solaris, 2014. © Luca Carey
So very interesting. Steve Ditko created the Dr. Strange character in the early ’60s, and Stan Lee introduced the “Master of Black Magic” in Strange Tales #110 (1963). The Ditko/Lee creation was a reflection of the uncanny times, a generation’s embrace of all things mystical and occult. Here Irons simultaneously appropriates the Marvel “property” (there is no mention of the company or the character name) while emulating Ditko’s style and the spirit of his and Lee’s Sorcerer Supreme. Irons did at least three posters for Space Age.
California Hall is a San Francisco landmark and makes an appearance in Dirty Harry (1971) in the scene where Callahan talks down a suicide jumper.
I’ve talked about several Troubador books so far: The Official AD&D Coloring Album (1979), the Science Fiction Anthology (1974), Tales of Fantasy (1975), and Space WARP (1978).
According to Wikipedia, artist-designer Malcolm Whyte “founded Troubador Press in 1959 as a job printer and designer/printer of greetings cards.” The San Francisco company published its first book—The Fat Cat Coloring and Limerick Book—in 1967.
Troubador continued to target the booming counterculture, specializing in intricately illustrated children’s educational books and alternative cookbooks. More esoteric material followed. Dennis Redmond illustrated the psychedelic Zodiac Coloring Book above, and the weirdest item in the company’s canon, The Occult Coloring Book (1971), was illustrated by Japanese-American Gompers Saijo, who was interned with his family in Pomona and Wyoming during World War II.
It’s easy to bash the hippies today, but credit where credit is due: they’re the ones who embraced and cultivated the kind of cerebral sci-fi that led to Roddenberry’s Star Trek and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and they’re the ones who pulled The Lord of the Rings into popular culture. “Frodo Lives!” was an enduring hippie meme before anyone else knew where Middle Earth was.
(Images via eBay, Etsy, and the Countercultural Books Wiki)
2 Warps to Neptune 