“Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no STAR WARS” George Lucas. “What we do now digitally with computers, Ray did digitally long before but without computers. Only with his digits.” Terry Gilliam. It […]
Let’s travel back in time, you and I. Let’s go back to a time before music was delivered in packets of data. Let’s travel back to a time of bell bottoms, long hair and muscle […]
So Superman is 75 years old. That’s astounding. What’s even more astounding is how good he looks, given that he is now a senior citizen. Special cases like Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come notwithstanding, it seems […]
The events in Boston at the beginning of this week were an awful tragedy and, naturally all our hearts go out to the victims. Boston is one of the oldest cities in the US and, […]
Books need a cover. At the very least one needs to know the title of the book and usually who wrote it. Those are basics. But the cover of a book is the first point […]
Whenever I think about black-and-white illustrations from the old science fiction magazines, it is always the work of Virgil Finlay that I picture in my head. And why not? The man was a genius with […]
So you know you’ve done it. I’m sure we all have at one point or another. You know what I’m talking about, right? You walk into a bookstore and there it is… the cover that […]
Before TV, before comic books, there were the pulp magazines – quickly produced and printed on low grade paper and wrapped in some of the most garish and lurid full colour covers. The covers worked […]
One of the great things about science fiction and fantasy is that it takes us to new worlds and gives us new perspectives on things that we never had before. With science fiction that can […]
With the release of the new movie OZ: The Great and Powerful this weekend, the world created by L. Frank Baum back in 1900 is getting a fresh look. Revisiting a classic is always a good […]
Pulp… no, wait… it should be written like this: PULP! What I am referring to is not what you find in your orange juice. It refers to a type of low grade paper that was […]
One of the more common tropes of fantasy illustration is depictions of women in armor, but this is not necessarily unique to fantasy illustration. Armored women have been depicted in art throughout the centuries. Most […]
The Shaver Mystery is part of the history of Amazing Stories Magazine, but it is certainly not considered one of the magazine’s shining moments. Barry Malzberg touched on it briefly in his first blog post […]
So, a couple weeks back I began talking about current fantasy artists. I want to continue with that theme this week, but I want to talk about digital artists. Specifically about digital painters. Photoshop began […]
Previously I blogged about that favourite trope of SF & Fantasy illustration: The Scantily Clad Female. That topic generated a lot of comments, so let’s look at the opposite end of the spectrum and see […]
The old axiom about not judging a book by its cover notwithstanding, I am going to judge the merits of various book covers that wrapped editions of heroic fiction. This is not a scholarly article, […]
Human beings have always had a fear of and, at the same time, a fascination with the “other”. Almost as soon as humans were able to make art on cave walls depictions of strange and […]
So, here’s a question: Say you’re a beautiful woman (I assume some of you reading this actually are women. Please believe me when I say that in my eyes all women are beautiful. If you’re […]
I have spent a lot of time in previous posts dwelling in the past. I have been like an old man suddenly lost to the present, the memory of times past reeling behind his eyes while he absently stirs his tea. Well, I think perhaps I should bring this topic into the present and talk about some of the science fiction and fantasy artists working today.
There has been an explosion of fantastic art. In the past fantastic art’s only reason for being was as illustration to fantastic literature. That changed and today fantastic art is it’s own reason for being. You can find fantasy art on posters, tee-shirts, coffee mugs. You can find it on the internet almost as easily as you can find pornography or lolcats.
When people think about science fiction the first thing they usually visualize are spaceships (or green skinned women in shiny bikinis, but that may just be me). The spaceship has been a ubiquitous part of […]
M. D. Jackson has been drawing since he could first hold a pencil. He has been writing for so long that he has, in fact, developed an alternate personality named Jack to handle the fiction.
His work has appeared in numerous magazines and on the front covers of many books as well as in the pages of Amazing Stories Magazine. You can also see a lot of it at his gallery.
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