Berlin (Jason Lutes)

Two brilliant pages from Jason Lutes's mammoth graphic novel set in the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

Berlin is published by Drawn & Quarterly.

Black Dogs

Kaye Blegvad's Dog Years is an appealing self-published illustrated story about her lifelong battle with depression, personified as a black dog (an animal associated in folklore with various nefarious doings). It originally appeared in Buzzfeed last fall, and has been made available in a hardcover edition through a Kickstarter campaign and probably via her website. It only takes a few minutes to read, and is worth a look.

Curiously, I have a dog who resembles Blegvad's, except for some white markings — but my dog is quite literal. He's actually rather sweet, although he is a handful.

Fans of Peter Blegvad's comic strip Leviathan may possibly recognize a small stuffed rabbit in one of Kaye's panels.

The Mark of Ubu

What's-his-name, in the role of the original sociopath. "His poltroonery is only surpassed by his invincible avarice" (Macmillan's Magazine, 1897).

Poster by Iida Lanki, from 2013.

More Stasys

I don't know if these are actual covers for the catalog of the Vilnius Book Festival or just posters, but either way I am in awe. The artwork is by Stasys Eidrigevičius.

Who was Silvio?

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when New York City had several excellent Spanish-language bookstores, the numerous volumes of Losada's Biblioteca clásica y contemporánea were a mainstay of their shelves. The paper and typography may not have been the greatest but they were relatively inexpensive and had simply but attractively designed covers (which, unfortunately, were easily soiled). Most of not all of the cover illustrations in the series, and all of the ones shown here, were by the prolific, but surprisingly elusive, Silvio Baldessari. (The top image, also by Baldessari, is from Losada's Novelistas de nuestra época series.) I only own a few of the books at this point so these images are mostly pilfered from the web.


Oddly, there is little information on the web about Silvio Baldessari. The best source I have found so far is from the blog Los parrafistas:

Silvio Baldessari is probably the most prolific book illustrator in the history of Argentina. Working always in a Picasso-Pop-Expresionist style that is so readily recognizable (his real signature, more so than the miniscule one that almost always appears at the bottom of his work), he designed each and every one of the covers of Losada's "Biblioteca Clásica y Contemporánea" y "Novelistas de nuestra época," as well as illustrating countless covers for the publishing house Paidós, above all in the collection "Letras Argentinas," and, it is said, served as the art director and designer for various Latin American publishers. But here's the point: I said "it is said" because, believe it or not, I couldn't find ONE single bibliographical reference on this artist on the ENTIRE internet. How is this possible? Not only that, but all the illustrations that I could find of this artist were put up by internet sellers, that is to say, no one has ever taken the trouble to scan an image of the artist, but only of the book.

I would like to talk more about this illustrator, but, as I said, I couldn't find a single line about his life, except that he was born in 1916, that he managed, at least in my case, to compel me to buy the book, regardless of its quality, and that he designed (this is mostly a conjecture based on my own experience than a non-existent statistical confirmation) hundreds and hundreds of book covers...

Baldessari appears to have published at least one book of his own illustrations, entitled Sinblabla or Sinblablá:


No doubt there's more information out there, somewhere, on this productive and talented artist, whose work would have been so familiar to generations of readers throughout Latin America and beyond.

Thanks to Berliac of Los parrafistas for permission to include two images and a translation of portions of his original post.

Stasys Eidrigevičius

There are some disadvantages to living in the shadow of a cultural capital, and one of them is not being sufficiently exposed to work by artists who may have long been well-known in their own countries and elsewhere but who through whatever whim of the art circuits never seem to earn comparable notice here.

Stasys Eidrigevičius is a Lithuanian-born artist who now resides in Poland. His work first came to my attention sometime in the 1990s, when at least three of the children's books he illustrated were published in the US by NorthSouth Books. Those titles, all of which now seem to be out of print, were Johnny Longnose, The Hungry One, and the best of them, Puss in Boots. (At least one other children's book, Little Pig, has been published by Viking Press; it too appears to be out of print.) Children's books, however, represent only a tiny fraction of Eidrigevičius's output, which includes painting, drawing, posters, political art, sculpture, photography, theatre design, and performances. As far as I can gather from the list of exhibitions on his website he has never had a significant show in New York City.

The images below are, respectively, from Puss in Boots, Johnny Longnose, and Little Pig. The images in the last-named work aren't paintings but photographs centering on painted masks.



There is a distinctive Eidrigevičius look in his picture books, and much of it has to do with the eyes, which are nearly almost wide-open but alarmingly expressionless. As in the films of the Quay Brothers, the worlds of animate and inanimate objects blur disturbingly into one another. Many of his subjects are being held against their will -- perhaps a reflection of his childhood under Communism -- although, as in the images below, it's not always clear exactly who is the captive and who the captor.



It's a fair question whether or not Eidrigevičius's work was ever really marketable for children. I suspect that it may well be in Europe, but perhaps not in the US (though my daughter enjoyed Puss in Boots). It would be nice if the full range of his work could get fuller exposure here.

A Journey Round My Skull has some additional images, and there are many more at the artist's own website. For those with the wherewithal there is a new retrospective collection of his work, Stasys 60, which can be obtained from ABE Marketing in Poland.

I'm not sure what the original purpose was of the image shown at the top of the page, which I found through image searching on the web. The cat's eyes are so mesmerizing that at first I didn't even notice the beaks of the birds, but I think it's the mouth, at once so realistic and so alien, that is the most unnerving.

Pleasures of the Macabre

Thomas Ott is a Swiss artist and graphic novelist whose work consists largely of wordless images rendered with scratchboard and whose tastes run decidedly towards the gruesome. These images are from a work, "Recuerdos de México," that so far I've only seen on the web, although it has appeared in some collections in Argentina (in the wonderfully named comics magazine Suda Mery K.!) and in Europe. It is scheduled to appear in the US in Ott's collection R.I.P: Best of 1985-2004, which will be released in April 2011 by Fantagraphics Books.

The country that produced José Guadalupe Posada would seem like a natural source of inspiration for Ott, and these pictures bring to mind Octavio Paz's oft-cited and splendidly garish words from The Labyrinth of Solitude:

The word death is not pronounced in New York, Paris or in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.

All of the above images are from El blog de la muerte, which has quite a few others as well.

Below are the covers from two of Ott's other books, both of which were also published here by Fantagraphics (although the Cinema Panopticum cover shown is from the French edition). Given a choice, I would start with Cinema Panopticum, which is a collection of several tales linked by a frame-tale, but both are worth exploring. There is more at Ott's website.

Flying slowly

By now, the status of the airship as an emblem of a kind of alternative, softer version of modern technological development is a well-established cliché, found throughout contemporary steampunk and fantasy from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials to the TV show Fringe. Why do these lumbering craft provoke such nostalgia?


Over the course of the 20th century, the Futurist aesthetic embodied by the airplane -- sleek, fast, loud, and efficient -- would gradually lose its appeal, done in by the nightmares of Guernica, the Blitz, Dresden, and the Enola Gay. The airship wasn't entirely innocent of such possibilities -- zeppelin raids killed hundreds in Britain in the First World War, and Thomas Harris's novel Black Sunday imagined a blimp as what we would now call a weapon of mass destruction -- but for lethal efficiency it really couldn't compare. Nor, in the end, could it compete commercially. For a brief period the airship seemed to offer a kind of compromise between the genteel leisure of the hot-air balloon and the machine-age imperatives of speed and maneuverability fulfilled by the airplane, but the disaster of the Hindenburg doomed it to be forever confined to limited and special uses like hovering over football stadiums. A sad but probably inevitable end for the emblem of a less hurried kind of technological development that perhaps wasn't really ever going to be possible.


Artists, fortunately, are less constrained by such considerations, and there's something particularly pleasing and restorative about the sight of an airship poised above a landscape -- or an iceberg.


The above four images are all from the Eisbergfreistadt project by the artists Kahn + Selesnick. The first two are in the form of postcards; the latter pair are notgeld (emergency money).


The image above is by Donald Evans, an American artist who sadly died too young in a fire in the Netherlands in 1977. Evans's work consisted almost entirely of postage stamps, drawn actual size and appropriately perforated and often endorsed, of imaginary countries with names like Domino, Amis et Amants, Lichaam and Geests (Body and Soul), and Mangiare. (He also drew a fascinating set of zeppelin stamps for the country of Achterdijk, but unfortunately they are triangular in shape and too difficult for me to reproduce.) Willy Eisenhart's The World of Donald Evans, long out-of-print but not impossible to locate, is the indispensable collection.


Finally, above is one of a series of Little Nemo Sunday cartoon panels by Winsor McCay devoted to an airship tour of North America. This particular image is from January 15, 1911 and I rather like its conceit of Nemo and his companion Flip sweeping newly fallen snow off the deck. The whole series can be enjoyed online and at full size at The Comic Strip Library.

Margaret and Alexander Potter

This Puffin picture book, which was published in the mid-1940s, is by the husband-and-wife team of Margaret and Alexander Potter. The human figures are almost unbearably crudely done (the cover is by no means the worst example), which is a shame because some of the colored spreads inside are quite appealing.

I don't know how the Potters divided their duties, but they were capable of sophisticated work, at least in terms of architectural draftsmanship (Alexander was an architect by profession). The following three images are from Houses (1948) and are reproduced from the page devoted to the Potters from Chris Mullen's web project called The Visual Telling of Stories.




Chris Mullen incidentally also has some scans from A History of the Countryside, but his images are evidently from a different, perhaps later printing, as they lack the background colors seen in the two-page spread below.


I rather like this layout, which is accompanied by a simple but intelligent discussion of urban planning. Here are close-up scans.



The Independent has an obituary of Margaret Potter, who died in 1984.

Chris Mullen reports that many of the early Picture Puffins, of which he reproduces a number of examples, were lithographed by the printing firm of W. S. Cowell of Ipswich. According to an interview he conducted with a former CEO of the firm, much of the Cowell archive was eventually discarded and burned.

Swallows and Amazons

I'm not big on boating and I've never had much of an urge to read any of these children's adventure stories, although I confess I am intrigued to learn that their author, Arthur Ransome, may have been a Soviet spy. One of these days I really should at least give the first one a shot. I do love these covers though. Ransome himself was responsible for both the jackets and their interior art; some of the books say "with help from Miss Nancy Blackett," but that's the author's little joke, as "Nancy Blackett" is in fact one of the characters in the series. (Ransome also named a yacht after her.)


The Godine editions in the US, which used to be the only ones I had seen, employ different cover art, very handsome in its own way, but the original hardcover jackets are still available in the UK; the full set can be seen [link no longer active] on the website of the Arthur Ransome Society. Some of the colors are more subtle on my copies, which are from the 1950s, by which time the books had already been reprinted dozens of times.

Up in the Downs

Artwork by Richard Doyle from The Scouring of the White Horse by Thomas Hughes. These illustrations are not in the copy I have, which is the American edition published by Ticknor & Fields in 1859. The elaborate titling, which I'm guessing is supposed to evoke the twisted branches of a hedgerow, reads The Scouring of the White Horse / A Country Legend.

The scene depicted, of stout Saxon warriors exuberantly memorializing King Alfred's victory over the Danes in 871 AD, is anachronistic, as it is no longer believed that the stylized hill figure known as the Uffington White Horse has anything to do with Alfred or with Anglo-Saxon England at all. It was carved into the chalk of the Berkshire Downs, in essentially the design in which it appears to this day, in the late Bronze Age (c. 800-1000 BC), and would have disappeared long ago had it not been periodically "scoured" of encroaching turf. That more than a hundred generations of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans not only refrained from obliterating the carving but actually went to the trouble of renewing it from time to time is, when you think about it, fairly astonishing. Perhaps it served as a convenient excuse for merrymaking -- it certainly did so in Tom Hughes's day. Whether the horse -- if that's indeed what it is -- was originally intended as a religious symbol or as some kind of territorial or tribal marker no one now knows.

The White Horse is located above the village of Uffington in what used to be part of Berkshire but is now Oxfordshire. From Oxford, where we were staying, it can be reached by taking a bus to the market town of Wantage, which has an excellent small museum devoted to the history of the region, and then a second bus that stops at the isolated crossroads below White Horse Hill. We scaled the hill the hard way, across its face through pastureland that was muddy in spots, not realizing that there was a paved road to the top of the ridge. Even on a fair March day -- there were paragliders soaring above us, and the views were splendid from the summit -- the site was uncrowded. A small flock of sheep just a few meters from the carving ignored our approach and only broke away when we strode right through their midst.

We sat down to catch our breath near the head of the figure, and while we were there passed our copy of an illustrated guidebook to a fellow climber so that he could prove to his skeptical son that he was indeed standing next to a giant horse, as the full outline of the carving, which measures more than 100 meters from nose to tail, is best seen from a distance or from above. Above and behind the horse, on the crest of the hill, are the earthworks of an Iron Age fort known as Uffington Castle. The Ridgeway, an ancient trail that runs through the Downs and on to Avebury, passes over the hill, and if you follow it west for a mile or so you will come to Wayland's Smithy, a fine Neolithic chambered long barrow sheltered in a beech grove.

There's no gift shop or visitor's center on White Horse Hill, and I for one hope there never is, as the bleak, peaceful solitude of the place allows one to better contemplate the views of the surrounding countryside as well as the vast expanses of time that are in evidence. There was a lone vendor selling ice cream from a van; we passed on the ice cream but took him up on what he solemnly promised was the best hot chocolate in the world. And it wasn't bad at that.

Tom Hughes's novel The Scouring of the White Horse is still enjoyable reading, although more reliable for its glimpses of Berkshire folklife than for its archaeology. Kate Bergamar's Discovering Hill Figures, in the Shire Classics series, is an excellent portable guide to the Horse and similar figures, most of which are far more recent in origin. The latest archaeological evidence is surveyed in Uffington White Horse in its Landscape, by C. Gosden et al.

Photo by Maddie.