Tyger, Tyger...

Once upon a time in a distant age Britain had an empire, generations of schoolchildren were educated in classes where maps of Britain and it's dominions were highlighted in red, with pink indicating recent or not so recently independent countries which still resided within the Commonwealth and should the shit hit the fan, could always be relied on to send troops to bolster the ranks of good old Tommy Atkins.

In those long gone and dimly remembered times the people of dear old Blighty had their news and entertainment delivered to them by people wearing dinner jackets and sounding like variations on a voice of John Mills. In other words, expensively educated and talking with a flat E. En fect everybedy telked with a flet E in thess deys, even people weth (shudder) regionel eccents telked weth flet Es.

Es ey teype thes ... sorry As I type this I am thinking back to my own childhood, growing up in a post war Britain, where the maps with the red and pink still hung yellowing on school walls, the illusion of dominion still stubbornly persisting, even though aside from the fact that the country was virtually bust there were the winds of change starting to erode the red bits on those now brittle maps.

So books that harkened back to the days of Empire didn't seem THAT bizarre and a lot of one's childhood reading was informed by what would now appear as patrician and somewhat condescending texts about men in pith helmets attended by friendly natives. Men in pith helmets usually equipped with maps and hunting rifles, friendly natives weighed down with white man's gear - masses of it - and also weighed down by their own superstitions, which only the man in the pith helmet could allay via the benefit of a sound mind, a decent public school education and his trusty fire stick, should push come to shove.

I was vividly reminded of these now wildly anachronistic texts, when working on one of the features destined for inclusion in issue 2 of Illustrators. Norman Boyd has written a superb piece on the life and work of Raymond Sheppard who died tragically young but worked with a determination and drive that offset his cruelly truncated career with a truly impressive back catalogue of artwork and illustrations, such that even if we had had a whole book to fill, we would have been hard put to it to decide what to leave out and what to include.

One of the commissions that he undertook saw the commencement of a long and fruitful collaboration with the retired hunter Jim Corbett. Corbett in many ways fulfilled the man in the pith helmet ideal, born in 1875, the son of a Postmaster stationed in Northern India. As a boy Corbett grew up with a deep love and affection for the flora and fauna of a part of the world where the jungles and ravines of North India abut the snow peaked Himalayas. If paradise could ever be said to exist on earth it was probably located in Corbett's back yard.

Despite his love and respect for the wildlife of the region, he was also prone to the follies of the time when it came to his dealings with what was then termed "game" and "big game". In both instances "game" refers to animals viewed through a telescopic rifle sight, the only difference being that the addition of the word "big" imbues the quarry with the ability to effectively take lethal action against it's tormentor should it get the opportunity.

Corbett soon came to regret his profligate destruction of some of the region's finest beasts and instead confined his culling activities to hunting down the deadly man-eating tigers and leopards that so blighted the lives of his neighbours. The first Corbett book upon which Raymond Sheppard  brought his considerable talents to bear was Man-Eaters of Kumaon, which was published with Sheppard's stellar artwork in 1952.

Here then are 12  good reasons why this book is such a masterpiece , add in Corbett's storytelling and despite the time warp, you have a book that is as compelling a page turner as it was when I first encountered it some fifty years ago.

When Is A McLoughlin Not A McLoughlin???

Following on from yesterday's posting and thinking of the months and months of my life and several other good souls lives, Mark Terry of Facsimile Dust Jackets and author David Ashord to name but a few, that were invested in making The Art of Denis McLoughlin a book worthy of it's subject, I thought I would run some of the covers that have been mistakenly attributed as being by the hand of Denis McLoughlin, when in fact they were created by other artists who had to cover for the great man when his unrelenting production schedule seemed on the point of chewing up time that was already apportioned elsewhere.

The covers in question were all from his "hardboiled fiction" covers for the Boardman Mystery series along with his Boardman Bloodhounds and also extended into his TVB paperback covers. several of these had actually made it onto the page layouts for the book before the mistake was spotted.

Here is the cover which got me checking with a number of sources as to the true provenance of these "misattributed" artworks:

Looks like a McLoughlin doesn't it? According to legend even Maurice Flanagan organizer of The Pulp and Paperback Fair thought it was when he used this image as one of a series of McLoughlin themed cards at one of his Paperback Fairs back in the day. It was Denis himself who flagged up the error.

Here are some more close but no cigar "Macs":

(I'm kinda relieved that the last five aren't by the great man.)

Coming Atcha!!!

As visitors to this blog are only too aware, your old Blogmeister has been conspicuous by his absence of late. Impervious to pangs of conscience, his keyboard has remained out of action at least as regards the cybernetic activity required to satiate the desires of some of his most loyal readers.

Has this man got no conscience?

Well actually he has and I have been feeling varying degrees of guilt but I comfort myself with the thought that it's all for a good cause.

And the good cause is nearly upon us as Illustrators Issue 1 along with The Art of Denis McLoughlin are currently being printed and bound and will be hitting these shores come August.

So here as a taster is the cover to The Art of Denis McLoughlin, plus the cover and some interior spreads from issue 1 of Illustrators.

And I think those of you who want to try this first issue out will agree (well I am hoping fervently that you will agree) Illustrators is going to be an ever better substitute for a daily blog - not to mention The Art of Denis McLoughlin, which finally does this amazing artist the justice he so richly deserves by providing a definitive collection of his work with accompanying text by the late artist along with a wonderful memoire and critical appreciation by his friend and biographer David Ashford.

The book also includes check lists of all those killer diller Bloodhound hardboiled fiction covers along with glowing reproductions of scores of covers most of which have not been seen by more then a few of his most devoted fans. Whilst his Buffalo Bill Annuals might well be reasonably familiar to a lot of collectors, there are few who have seen all his TVB noir paperback covers. Within the pages of this book you will see all of the TVB Paperback covers painted by McLoughlin, along with some really early Bloodhounds. There is discussion of his techniques and reproductions including full size details of some truly stunning originals.

McLoughlin is also the lead feature in the debut issue of Illustrators along with an interview with Ian Kennedy looking back on his over half century of working as one of this country's premier illustrators and comic strip artists, with features on the Spanish artist and doyen of romantic illustration Angel Badia Camps and Parisian artist Cheri Herouard adding further luster to the proceedings. A beautifully instructive essay by Mick Brownfield takes you behind the scenes of one of the artist's most iconic Radio Times Christmas covers.

We have got the most fantastic team of contributors on board and over coming months you can look forward to features by the artist and writer David Roach, writers David Ashford Norman Boyd and Gary Lovisi, ex Fleet Street Art Editor Bryn Havord, the writer and broadcaster Brian Sibley and host of the amazing Carol Day website and David Wright specialist Roger Clark to name but a few.

All in all perhaps not such a bad trade off after all.

We hope you will join us for the ride.


We will be giving you a sneak preview of issue 2 shortly.

Achtung Alonso!

As in Matias Alonso. Having just received the latest list of Commando comics from the ever pro-active team, located in their sand bagged bunker in deepest Dundee, I am pleased to report that their inspired decision to reprint their earliest stories is delivering up some real classics, which have up until now been locked away in the vaults of DC Thomson for over fifty years.

Here's the cover of their most recent reprint of these golden age stories and as you can see by the Ken Barr cover, this one promises action and suspense aplenty. The contents really live up to the brooding dynamism of Barr's cover art. In fact if anything, the artwork actually eclipses Barr's painting in terms of sheer over the top, jaw clenching, all out manic in-your-face seismic action drawing. The only artist that was capable of outdoing Barr in this department was Matias Alonso and as mentioned in previous postings Alonso's primary influence was Burne Hogarth and not that of Milton Caniff, which so many of his colleagues appeared to be in thrall to.

Alonso's work has been conspicuous by it's absence from Commando's recent reprint roster save for the relatively anodyne Johnny the Jinx and D Day Plus, which isn't 100% Alonso as it features Luis Bermejo's pencils, which when combined with Alonso's lush and inventive inking made for one of the finest jobs either of these two artists produced for Commando.

However both of these stories lack the sheer visceral fury of Alonso's earlier Commando output, his work made even Hogarth's beetling brow'd, muscle tensed and mascara rimmed Tarzan look fairly supine. Night Raider, then is a pleasant surprise and distinguished not just by the fact that it is Alonso's debut story for the title but also by the fact that there are women in the story, one of whom is a very fetching French resistance fighter, so go over to Commando's website and check out the new releases and if you have an iPad you can start reading it now, if you want to subscribe.

OK that's it for the moment and back to working on issue 2 of Illustrators. More on this shortly...

Here in the meantime is the rest of the current crop of Commandos courtesy of Commando editor Calum Laird, who is doing such an incredible job with this title:

Commando No 4499

Hunting Mussolini

The Convict Commandos — Jelly Jakes, Titch Mooney, Smiler Dawson — and their commander Guy Tenby had been given another job. This time they were to hunt down Mussolini in his hide-out. Easier said than done when they weren’t the only ones doing the same.
   Guy, as usual, had a plan…but it wasn’t supposed to include Jelly hanging from the undercarriage of an airborne Fieseler Storch!

Story: Alan Hebden
Art: Manuel Benet
Cover: Manuel Benet



Commando No 4500

Lightning Strike

The war in the Far East was almost over. Japan’s armed forces had been ground down and the country was on its knees. The Japanese hadn’t given in though, they hoped super-fighters like the Kyushu Shinden — Magnificent Lightning — could stem the flow of US bombers ravaging their country.
   They could never have guessed that the Shinden’s finest moment would come protecting the very enemies it had been designed to destroy.

Story: Alan Hebden
Art: John Ridgway
Cover: John Ridgway



Commando No 4505

Night Raider

Out of the night sky he came – a man with no mercy in his heart and a blazing tommy-gun in his hands, whose one ambition was to wreak destruction on all things Nazi. He became the Scarlet Pimpernel of German-occupied Europe.


Introduction by Calum Laird, Commando Editor

Women in Commando are a rare sighting but, like buses, when they do turn up there’s more than one. I counted at least three in here, and a bit of romance.
   Don’t think that it means that Stainton’s story isn’t an all guns blazing story as it is, running from the beaches of Dunkirk to a full-on Commando raid in France, and with barely time to reload along the way. His touch means that the espionage, beautifully pointed up by Ken Barr’s dramatic night drop cover, manages to be action-packed, not tension-filled.
   Add to that Alonso’s 100mph inside art and you have a solid gold winner. Makes you proud to be part of the Commando Team.

Night Raider originally Commando No35 (April 1962)

Story: Stainton
Art: Alonso
Cover: Ken Barr


Commando No 4502

Battle Flag

The Second Battalion, Daleshire Light Infantry, had something to be proud of — their very own “battle flag”, a standard given to them after their heroic triumph over Napoleon’s finest troops. Carried into action, it would inspire the men to further brave deeds.
   So when one young officer’s courage failed him and the flag was captured, the thought of it in enemy hands made him vow to keep it safe — even after his death!


Introduction by Scott Montgomery, Commando Deputy Editor

Gritty action is undoubtedly what Commando does best. However, over the decades there have also been comedies, capers, historical epics, science-fiction and…ghost stories. Battle Flag is a good example of the latter. After a detailed framing sequence, veteran writer Cyril Walker cleverly weaves a tale with an eerie thread that runs throughout but does not overwhelm the action and adventure. Interestingly, the working title for this story was “The Flintshire Phantom”. That’s a good one and, had it been pitched today, I’m sure that it would have been used! Enjoy.   

Battle Flag, originally Commando No 2063 (February 1987) Commando 4502

Story: Cyril G. Walker
Art: Cecil Rigby
Cover: Jeff Bevan

Once Upon A Time In A Land Faraway...

there lived a  storyteller who brought to life his fantastic tales with the aid of the world's greatest artists, writers and musicians. They all lived together in the storyteller's Magic Kingdom located in Burbank California, where with the aid of devices that projected their fantasies all around the world they devised their entertainments.

However, not all the work that occurred in the Magic Kingdom was free from tribulation and sometimes the dark forces beyond its gilded walls threatened it's very existence. Wars and labor disputes as well as hostile takeovers had created deep divisions that threw a shadow across otherwise sunlit corridors. But despite these troubles the dwellers inside the Magic Kingdom were contented in their work as they continually strove to ensure that their realizations of the storyteller's dreams matched his expectations.

In their constant strive to fulfill this remit, no amount of effort was too much. New and ever more potent means of delivering the storyteller's dreams to audiences far and wide were explored and as a consequence more and more of the storyteller's accumulated gold was gambled in the making of these stories.

And here dear reader (assuming you are still with us) is just such an example of this phenomenon, in 1959 Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty was released having had a huge production budget lavished on it, with extensive use of the Disney Studio's multiplane camera, six channel stereophonic sound and wide angle Technirama pumping up the budget to $6,000,000, making the film the biggest financial gamble the studio had taken since recovering from the near wipe-out that the War had inflicted on their export markets nearly twenty years earlier.

Well if you didn't already know, you have probably guessed, the film's reception at the box office wasn't the ringing endorsement the Studio were hoping for and the Company posted it's first loss for over a decade in it's 1959-60 report to it's shareholders. As a consequence the axe was taken to the animation department and huge layoffs resulted but ironically one of the facilitators of the rise of the Disney studio and accessory to one of the greatest betrayals of King Mouse was left in place to bring his considerable technical expertise to helping the studio work within a hair shirt budget. Ub Iwerks, first name pronounced You - Bee, had worked with Disney when they were both teenagers at a commercial art studio in Kansas City. While Iwerks was a highly talented artist with an inventive and inquiring mind, he was shy and introverted. Disney in contrast, whilst never possessing the artistic talents of Iwerks was a visionary and a natural businessman with the ability to sell himself and his ideas and with Disney's innate ability to spot a good opportunity when he saw one,  it it wasn't long before he and Iwerks still on the cusp of their twenties had formed their own company producing a line of films entitled Laugh-O-Grams. When that company went belly up Iwerks returned to the Kansas City Film Ad Company whilst Disney with typical enterprise took himself off to California to set up a new venture which he was convinced would seal his fortune.

It wasn't long before Disney was writing to Iwerks to offer him a job at the newly formed Disney Brothers Studio (Walt's brother Roy, who had a good head for figures and was a tempering influence on some of Walt's more extravagant schemes had also moved to California to work as the studio's accountant). The somewhat ironically titled Oswald the Luck Rabbit was the first hit that the studio had, but the joy was short lived when the character and most of Disney's animators were stolen from them by their distributor. Disney took the distributor to court but lost. Iwerks was one of the few who remained loyal to Disney. It was therefore really devastating when a few years later another unprincipled distributor attempted a similar heist with Disney's even more successful Mickey Mouse. Disney hung onto the character whose copyright ownership was beyond dispute but this time Iwerks left (with most of Disney's key animators) disillusioned with the endless toil and studio tensions and convinced that he could make a better living for himself running his own studio.

Several years and several animated flops later Iwrks returned to work with Disney and this time he devoted himself to pioneering new visual effects including a way of melding film and drawing together in such films as Song of the South and more spectacularly Mary Poppins. But the innovation he created which was to really slash their production costs and enable the studio to continue producing animated feature length films was the xerographic process for cel animation, which was first presented to cinema audiences with the release in 1961 of 101 Dalmations.

By the time that film came out the book that I am sharing with you today had been sitting on the shelf of my local bookshop, come newsagent, come stationer for about three years. Like the film it celebrated the Giant Golden Book of Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty had overblown it's budget and much to the supposed chagrin of King's Stationers, located in St Leonards on Sea, Sussex, it's 25 shilling price tag was just too steep for the average shopper. So there it languished next to it's other over priced for it's locality, neighbor Tales of the Greeks and Trojans. Both handsome books, both quietly pining for a good home.

Well, eventually (albeit several years later) I weakened and fortified with funds from a paper round I treated myself to this book, which I have never seen anywhere else (try Googling for it to see what I mean).

So here's your opportunity to savor one of the most exquisite Disney children's books ever published, in an era when a book like this could appear with one of stylist Eyvind Earle's superb artworks as cover and endpapers with more of his illustrations accompanying stills and character sketches from this commercially flawed but nonetheless beautiful film.

Down in the Dungeons - The Legend of Grimrock Awaits

As I mentioned on my previous posting, some of the work currently occupying my energies is involved with a team of games developers and as a consequence my games antenna is in a much more alert mode than is usually the case.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled over the work of a team of Finnish games developers, who like Dave Morris (author of the graphic epic Mirabilis and soon to be arriving on your iPad Frankenstein Interactive Book) and your blogmeister have happy memories of a ground breaking game which went under the title of Dungeon Master and changed the face of computer gaming when it first appeared in 1986.

The developers working under the title of Almost Human Games, first cooked up what was to become The Legend of Grimrock in April 2011 as a weekend's moment of catharsis, during a particularly hectic period for the four guys who were busily chasing deadlines working on other companies games. They thought about the first person RPG games such as Eye of the Beholder and the aforementioned Dungeon Master they had enjoyed so much as children and just for the fun of it knocked out this little trial piece.



Three months later and with the pressure of commissioned work easing off a bit, they had a look at what they had wrought and thought a bit more seriously about actually making a game imbued with the spirit and atmosphere of Dungeon Master but with the benefits of all the developments and refinements the games industry has achieved in the intervening quarter century.

Like all small concerns, they had to work within a very tight budget, financing themselves meant setting parameters for the way the game would unfold and also for the amount of outside help they could pull in. The first constraint actually suited the format of the game perfectly, so this is no Skyrim affair where you can wander over an endless landscape, the landscape of Grimrock is the dungeons and the feeling of claustrophobia it engenders just adds to the sense of unease in a way that bigger games with bigger budgets fail to achieve. Also and as you will notice from the trailers, the game  as with it's predecessors, is grid based in terms of movement which is a constraint that adds greatly to the fun of devising strategies for defeating the grim cavalcade of fetid monsters that inhabit these dungeons.

The parallels to Dungeon Master are also evident in some of the traps that await the incautious explorers with pressure plates, fireballs and rooms full of pressure sensitive trap doors. The runic magic system which is based on skills acquired on the perilous journey will also be  a nice reminder of times past, pointless Googling to find out how to cast a lightning bolt if your wizard skills are barely up to summoning a light spell.

This is niche games for niche markets and the gamers that The Legend of Grimrock is unerringly directed at will be blown away by what they see when they start to explore the damp and foul smelling crannies of a game that pits four adventurers against some of the most diabolical beasties and fiendish brain teasers ever to be encountered in the dark recesses of a digital dungeon. Just imagine this thing on an iPad!

The work that has been carried out to achieve this level of games artistry is simply inspirational, a lot of the concept painting was done on the basis of what the team would want from a game like this, without constraining themselves to paring down their visions to allow for the endless hours transforming these 2d paintings into 3D actuality. Above is the very first concept painting whilst below is a glimpse of the Dungeon Ogre in the early stages of his animation.

Which brings  me to the important release information, the game has been developed for PCs as it's first incarnation which will be released on the 11th of April - further details here. And then the plan is to release versions for Mac and iOS as soon as is feasible after that.

The rest is down to you dear reader, so help spread the word, visit their Facebook page, check out their YouTube channel, log on to their website and lastly but by no means leastly, buy a copy of this friggin' thing, which has a 20% pre-order  discount up until 11th April when the game is released!

All images © AlmostHumanGames 2012