Ragged Claws Network

Click here to view all of the Paul Lehr paperback covers I’ve posted so far.

The cavalcade of covers by Jeffrey Jones continues, though the pace is slowing…

Click here to view the entire collection (so far).

The original reproduction on many of the following covers by Jeffrey Jones, all from the library of yours truly, was very poor, so my scans are sometimes not the best here. One exception is the last cover, Twilight of the Serpent, which actually showcases Jones’s artwork in more detail and with more lively colour than does the rather dour reproduction on the back cover of publisher Underwood-Miller’s lavish hardcover, The Art of Jeffrey Jones.

My favourites this time around are the covers for The Curse of Rathlaw (1968), an early effort in which Jones’s attractive design for the vignette is nicely reinforced by the typography, and Twilight of the Serpent (1977), a later cover which displays Jones’s hard-won skills as a draftsman (or draughtsman, if you prefer), mastery of lost-and-found edges in oil painting, and increasing willingness in the 1970s and early 1980s to produce images that went against the grain of traditional heroic fantasy.

The following cover by Jones is from the Skywald horror magazine, Nightmare, volume 1, number 6 (December 1971):

The 1964 edition of The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke with the cover by Paul Lehr is a pretty cool find, I think. It’s a pity the artwork is obscured by the title, etc., but the book is in excellent condition, so it scanned fairly nicely, and of course, it is instructive to compare it with Lehr’s later covers, which, unlike The Deep Range, typically combine highly saturated colours with a strict adherence to traditional colour schemes.

Jones’s Scheherazade graced the cover of the Styx #2 back in 1973 (37 years ago!):

Styx was published by Winnipeg’s own Joseph Krolik, who was very active in fandom beginning in the mid-to-late 1960s, when he and a buddy, Andris Taskans, both in high school at the time, started a club called “The Science Fiction Fans & Comic Collectors of Winnipeg” and published a “clubzine” called Universe that ran for seven issues.

On 05 March 2010, Glimmer Graphics, known to readers of this blog as the publisher of an ongoing series of first-rate prints and posters by Jeffrey Jones, will release Poetry (see above image), a lush new 22 x 15 inch limited-edition giclée print by Barry Windsor-Smith. Each of the 375 prints that make up the edition will be signed and numbered and will be presented in a foil-stamped linen folder with a tipped-on colour plate. The unit price is US$135, shipped and insured, and you may pay in full or with installments. To place your order, click here.

This is NOT a paid advertisement. If the money BWS makes from the print enables him to complete work on his long-awaited Monsters graphic novel, that will be payment enough. The previews on BWS’s site are gorgeous!

BONUS LINKS:

The Barry Windsor-Smith Conan Archives Volume 1 HC (Publication Date: 13 January 2010) — “now presented as they were intended, remastered using the original color palette!”

The Barry Windsor-Smith Conan Archives Volume 2 HC (Publication Date: 19 May 2010) — “The two Barry Windsor-Smith archives collect all of the historic and influential Conan the Barbarian comics drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith,” including his adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails”!

Even though I don’t much care for any of the above covers, I have decided to include them here anyway for what they reveal about Jones’s slow but steady development as an artist.

That makes 16 covers by Paul Lehr displayed here, with more to come…

Note that the first two paperback covers below are from early in Lehr’s career as a cover artist while the third one is from fairly late in Lehr’s career:

From the library of yours truly:

BONUS LINK:

Figure Gallery at corbenstudios.com — 69 years old, and still going strong…

Here’s one of a signed-and-numbered edition of fifty prints, published by Idyl Impress in 1977, that were hand-coloured with watercolour by Jeffrey Jones. It is followed by the uncoloured version, which was published the same year by Idyl Impress in a signed-and-numbered edition of 1200:

Here’s a book I never expected to see reprinted. It’s Barron Storey’s The Marat/Sade Journals, a visual diary that uses the play Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss as the jumping off point for a raw, painterly exploration of the deep despair of “an ageing artist” forced to deal with the end of a romantic relationship. The book was first published in 1993 by Tundra Publishing and limited to 1,000 copies, and the price of a good, used copy has since climbed into the hundreds of dollars in the collector’s market. The new edition by Graphic Novel Art, re-edited by the artist — 80% of the art has been re-scanned from the originals — with an introduction by David Mack, a new drawing by Dave McKean, and an afterword by Storey himself, is printed on silk-varnished 140gr paper and includes a sewn binding (rather than the glued binding of the first edition) to make the book feel more like one of Storey’s actual journals.

DETAILS:

Barron Storey: The Marat/Sade Journals
132 pages
6.4″ x 9.4″ x 0.8″
Full colour

PURCHASE LINKS:

Buy Barron Storey: The Marat/Sade Journals from the publisher on ebay

Buy Barron Storey: The Marat/Sade Journals from Gallery Nucleus

Buy Barron Storey: Life after Black (the sequel to The Marat/Sade Journals) from the publisher on ebay

[N.B.: I receive no money at all from the sale of this book, which I ordered for my personal library just yesterday; my recommendation is free.]

BONUS LINKS:

Barron Storey: The Journals — follow the progress of Storey’s latest journal pages on blogspot.

Paint it Black: Carl Wyckaert on Barron Storey’s Life After Black — an interview with Barron Storey’s publisher, the owner of Graphic Novel Art, based in Belgium.

Review of Barron Storey: Life after Black

Todd Adams of Glimmer Graphics has a beautiful new limited edition print by Jeffrey Jones available for purchase on his company’s Web site. “I have published over 50 fine art prints through the years,” writes Todd, “and this is the finest print quality I have seen to date.” Here’s a link to the order page. And here’s a copy of the image Todd sent out to promote the print:

Jones created the above painting for Meisha Merlin Publishing’s deluxe limited edition of the first book in George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire & Ice” epic. The new Glimmer Graphics print is comprised of 375 signed and numbered copies, as well as 25 artist proof copies, all on 500 g/m² acid-free, ultra-smooth paper. Sheet size is 22 x 16 inches, with an image size of 19 x 12.5 inches.

BONUS LINK:

Work in Progress: The A Game of Thrones Cover by Jeffrey Jones

Frazetta’s obvious borrowing from Pyle has been pointed out many times in the past; however, I’ve never seen anyone add Wyeth’s painting to the mix (although surely someone has, the line of influence being so clear). Now, of the three galleon paintings, it seems obvious to me that Pyle’s original effort is not only the first but also the best of the three. It’s the best composed; it’s the most expressively painted; it’s the most dramatic. No wonder Wyeth and Frazetta (who seems to me to have borrowed as much from Wyeth’s galleon as from Pyle’s) were enthralled by Pyle’s Attack on a Galleon. It’s a masterpiece. And which of the remaining two galleon paintings is the weakest, Wyeth’s picturesque, chocolate-box cliché or Frazetta’s virtuosic but underdeveloped pastiche? You decide…