Cloud 109 - Episode 21

As you will (hopefully) recall from last week, Cloud 109 the virtual world where Gina, Cary and Rabby spend much of their waking moments is down due to a mysterious virus which has yet to be isolated and dealt with.

In the meantime the site itself has had to shut down all it's servers and is losing ten million credits a day.

And it seems that Cary has gone AWOL, or at least he's turned his phone off.

(To get the preceding chunk of this ongoing adventure click here:)

As followers of this strip will realise, there is a lot of the literally real world which comes into play as Gina, Cary and Rabby struggle to make out what's happening on Cloud 109. The photo on the wall with the Ace of Spades impaled with a dart through it's centre harks back to the days when our youngest was in a band called The Riddles with a front man Mr Jimmy Riddle; who bore an uncanny resemblance to Johnny Thunders. Tom who now goes under the moniker of Tommy Chain is chief chain wielder and whip cracker with Brighton band, The Dark Horses. The Horses most recently provided the soundtrack to the recent BBC Radio 4 adverts for The History of Everyday Objects and are about to tour the U.K. with The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Further weird connections, the graffiti behind the group shot was at least partially created by Tom's elder brother Jack when he was working as assistant to the mysterious street artist Eine. Jack who had eschewed university in favor of a rock n roll lifestyle, had quit Hastings and moved to London working a succession of menial jobs until he landed the posting with Eine. This happy state of affairs was sadly compromised by the fact that there was a whole contingent of other young bohos who had also moved up to London from Hastings and were hanging out with remnants from The Libertines, Amy Winehouse's circle, Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jongs - whatever. Unfortunately these assorted psychedelic types embedded themselves in the consciousness of Eine and with what can only be described as delicious irony he decided that Hastings must have something going for it relocating himself and his young family down to Hastings forthwith. Apparently in the fervent hope that his dear little children would grow up to be as dissolute and flaky as the glorious cavalcade of no hopers currently sofa surfing or sleeping in cars around London's East End have turned out to be.

Jack who under no circumstances would countenance a move back to Hastings shacked up with an enchanting New York stylist and is currently residing in Brooklyn, still pursuing the dream.

Away With The Faeries - The Land of Froud

I remember that for students of illustration in the early 1970's the dream was always to develop your craft in such a manner that your three year degree course would culminate with a really spectacular summer show, to which various movers and shakers in the publishing business would be invited. With your work adorning the display boards that sectioned off each area of desk space and with glasses of wine and vol aux vents in attendance you would perhaps discuss book deals with publishers eager to employ your talents, or perhaps you might refer them on to the svengali'esque and newly acquired agent standing with proprietorial intent to your immediate left, as the best person to discuss the finer intricacies of contracts and rights issues.

Well that was the plan at least, and that's all that most of us seemed to think of, totally unaware or uninterested in working for the world of advertising, design, direct mail shots and all the other real money spinners, not really that much interested in magazines either apart from the quality Sunday supplements or The Radio Times, which at the time was a big patron of illustration (alas no longer).

No it was publishing or bust, we were all living in a fantasy world, sedated by spliffs and alcohol, as we agonized over whether we should really struggle into college from our seedy digs or just have another cup of Earl Grey tea and listen to Can or perhaps The Pothead Pixies as the austerely beautiful Mucha muses gazed down reproachfully from their posters at the hippyfied squalor they were mute witnesses to.

But despite our ongoing sedation on the Isle of the Lotus Eaters (aka Art College) we weren't entirely oblivious of what was going on around us and one of the artists whose work was an ongoing source of interest to yours truly was an ingenue illustrator by the name of Brian Froud, whose work did appear sporadically in small distribution picture books (in the days when publishers could and did take risks) and the occasional paperback cover, most notably a trilogy of books by Lloyd Alexander - the first of which "The Black Cauldron" was turned into a feature length animation by the Disney studio with disastrous consequences - but that's another story for another time as they say.

So getting back to Froud, his work was fascinating, but you had to seek it out as even though the books were being published they were not mainstream by a long chalk. But when you did discover them, they were always very rewarding with clear references to the golden age of fantasy illustration which was very in vogue in the early seventies. There was the obvious tip of the hat to Rackham, but also Swedish illustrator John Bauer, where Froud had picked up a lot of his ideas for Troll Couture from.

It was in 1976, when we had all just recently left college and were struggling with the realities of making a living out of what we had absorbed, that David Larkin a very enterprising editor at leading paperback publisher Pan Books, put together a collection of Froud's work in identical format to a series of books he'd been issuing on illustrators such as Rackham, Dulac and Kay Nielson. The "Land of Froud" was a huge success and Larkin very rapidly developed a follow up, in an amazingly short time frame by combining Froud's talents with that of fellow illustrator and near neighbor Alan Lee, as both men had now decamped from London where they had shared studio space provided by their agent Artist's Partners and moved down to Devon with spouses and girlfriends to create their own fantasy illustration revival.

By the time "Faeries" came out it was 1977, it effectively launched both artists into new directions, most notably the world of film, but by then art students had stopped listening to Can and The Pothead Pixies...

... and were into this kind of stuff (eat your hearts out Kasabian) and illustration was heading in another and less romantically indulgent direction.

Cloud 109 - Episode 20

Well, Gina, Cary and Rabby's meanderings around their favorite form of on-line opiate, the weird and wonderful world of Cloud 109, have thus far, not been a resounding success. Their attempts to gain much needed credits via Cary's techie friend Matt have been well and truly thwarted and worse still it looks like Cloud 109 itself might be down for a long time.

What are the alternatives - perhaps more time in the real world?

But then when you see what Gina, Cary and Rabby's real world is all about the cybernetic chaos of Cloud 109 doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all.

If only Matt and his programming buddies can get the thing back on line...

Note to readers:

As you will see I've had a bit of a rethink about page 19; in terms of the book's dynamics it has to spell "WEIRD" and although I wasn't unhappy with the way the page had come out as a standalone piece of work, I didn't think it jarred the flow of the pages as much as required. There's always a catalyst to these kind of decisions and in my case, it was checking out new costume ideas for Gina, Cary and Rabby's next visit to the cyber lounge, whereupon I stumbled across a fantastic photo of a cyber Goth girl with those out there contact lenses, which I know all you Goth girls love to wear for special occasions, such as important job interviews etc, etc.

Anyway the lenses were the catalyst as was the lovely work that Jame's Corcoran has been creating on his own blog where he has got this monochrome plus one color vibe going on, which immediately creates it's own particular retro zeitgeist, so it's compare and contrast time as I run past both the options for you gentle readers.

The earlier pages from this ongoing epic can be found here.

UK Comics and the Latin Influence

In 1955, Milanese artist and writer Gino D'Antonio met up with fellow artist Rinaldo D'Ami who with his brother ran a studio in Milan supplying the UK as well as France and Italy with top flight artwork and scripts - in fact in many instances the complete package for content hungry comic publishers. D'Ami whose extrovert personality and passion for drawing were key factors in the success of the studio immediately recognised in D'Antonio an artist of considerable flair and ability. It was this meeting that propelled D'Antonio from his already very successful home grown career as an artist and writer in the direction of London's Amalgamated Press, where he was in such demand that he had more work than he could comfortably handle to pick and choose from.

As a consequence he was a regular in A.P.'s weekly comics and when A.P.'s monthly pocket libraries turned their attention to revisiting the still recent Second World War; D'Antonio seemed like a natural choice. His ability to portray vivid action and his brilliance at creating convincing looking protagonists for the adventures he was commissioned to portray put him in the super league of artists working on these comics.

Here for your consideration are a sequence of pages from the opening chapter of War Picture Library's "Battle Drop". I've pleaded with Steve Holland editor of the super series of Carlton reprints of these comics to include this story in a future collection, as to me it is still one of the greatest examples of this kind of artwork for this kind of comic ever to see print.

Some of the other artists sharing studio space evidently thought so too as virtually every page from this comic was swiped and not just for interior work. Here's a couple of cover samples by Alessandro Biffignandi and Pino Del Lorco.

More on the fascinating story behind much of this cover art can be read in a series of brilliant essays written by my good friend David Roach at Leif Peng's essential Today's Inspiration blog.