What is it about death at the hands of “La belle Dame sans merci” that the young Romantic finds so alluring? Depends on what you mean by “death,” I suppose. But the Romantic goes further, conflating “la petit morte d’Holophernes” with “Le Morte d’Holophernes,” even though common sense says the two are drastically different things. Is common sense the enemy of art? At the very least, it would appear to be the enemy of Romanticism, new as well as old.

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* If I had to guess, I would say that comic artist and illustrator, Barry Windsor-Smith, who has drawn and painted numerous pictures over the years of historical and mythological women holding, fondling, and kissing the severed heads of young men, and who was himself a prominent member of the “New Romantic Brotherhood” of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was also a proximate influence on “Synchrony.”

Has Muth’s early work in comics ever been reprinted? Not that I know of, and it’s a damn shame, too!

Like it? Enough to buy it? If your answers are yes, and yes, you’re in luck, because the current owner has it listed for sale at US$600. Contact information is available on this Comic Art Fans page.

Rightly or wrongly, I have long thought of Muth’s style at the beginning his career, when he drew the above stories, as “School of Jeffrey Jones.” There are, however, definite similarities between Muth’s painting style and palette and Alan Lee’s watercolour illustrations of the late 1970s* and beyond; so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if Lee’s work was also, as much as Jeffrey Jones’s, an influence on the “look” of “Small Gifts” and, especially, “Pursuit.”

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* The first edition of Faeries by Lee, Froud, et al., appeared in 1978.