Everything Wrong is Right Again

Oscar Wilde once said, “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily, that is what fiction means”.
But when an author combines the real and the fictional so well, when he mixes the ingredients so deeply that one cannot quite remember whether it was Whistler, Sickert or Hallward that is the one Victorian Painter who is not like the others, and when everything and everyone is in his and her place (or is it someone else’s?)… fiction can mean still more.

Mugnaini

When I was a lad I read Ray Bradbury, and of his many indelible stories Usher II and The Exiles held a special resonance.
These were not fiction, they were… something else. Bradbury was a magician, and The Exiles (and others) an incantation. A summoning. Magic on the printed page.*

In Kim Newman’s latest – Johnny Alucard – the marvelously-named author Kenneth Anger believes in this sort of magic. Of words made flesh. Of Cinema writ large. Maybe writ in blood.
Maybe it’s untrue, but why would that noted liar and magician Kim Newman lie to me? And does it matter if he has?
This is where those lines – between truth and fiction, between facts and gossip, between fiction and magic – blur to the point of uselessness.

I’ve loved Newman’s Anno Dracula since I read it decades back.
I read it again (this time aloud) after last year’s trip to Brighton for the World Fantasy Convention.
I’d been fortunate to meet up with the author there, and returned with signed books.
But I put off the reading of this newest work (the fourth “real novel” in this series) for months. And even now, I’m going slowly.
The suspense is terrible. I hope it’ll last….

I’m only at page 300, and while I have some thoughts about how I might end it, there’s nothing to say that Newman will agree, or even stick the landing.
And it doesn’t matter. Because it’s not about the destination, truly. It’s not a question of whether it ends in dust and disarray. It IS those things – red dust specifically: “Drac”.
It’s a series of short stories and novellas that pretend to be a novel. Just like how Uncle Bradbury used to make ’em.

I remembered my qualms about Anno Dracula. “Really, a book about Vampires? Who cares?”.
Well, me for one. Neil Gaiman (as the new Titan Books edition of the novel makes clear on the spine) for another.
I had qualms about starting Johnny Alucard for a very different reason – because the book would wrap around that second Age of Victorian Values – The Age of Thatcher – the very period that had inspired Anno Dracula in the first place. And, I think, the key to so much of its power.
A vampiric ouroboros, I worried that this confection must collapse under the weight of its own referents like a flan in a cupboard.

I was wrong to doubt. At first, I simply enjoyed its game of flashback and substitution. The magic of movies at their most intense.
The ouroboros seemed bent on swallowing its own tail (well… tale) and draining it dry, but I went with the arterial flow. Why not?
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, unmade – remade – made as an alternate history’s Dracula in Ceaucescu’s Romania?
Splendid!

A swan song for Philip Marlowe outside Poodle Springs was charming, but brief. And light.
An aperitif? A sorbet? Or were we getting as lost in the West as the “vipers” themselves?

And then another change of scene, some light…. necking?
The Dude? The Slayer? And a certain rumpled detective?
What!?!
Well, all I’m saying is that I wouldn’t leave town if I was you.

And that’s when I realized that this wasn’t an ouroboros at all. There was no end in sight, certainly not in the fanged mouth of Maggie Thatcher.
No, not a coiled serpent, more a sort of Moebius Strip. It wasn’t covering the same ground or coming from the same place. Rust never sleeps. Anywhere.
Through the Looking Glass? More like ‘Through with the Looking Glass’.
And just as well, mirrors are bloody useless to a vampire…. A vampire needs an audience.

Like Swann’s famous contract at The Paradise, “All item’s excluded are deemed included.”

 

* In my mouth (during a public reading) his words proved merely a recipe – a list of delicious ingredients that I was utterly incapable of presenting properly. But in the proper hands…

Influence, Inspiration, and Homage

When I began to study pin-ups in earnest, it was no different than studying all the other great illustrators that line my library shelves. The best were astonishing craftsmen and there was much to learn. But pin-ups needn’t exist in a vacuum, especially where there are specific characters to portray, and other worlds to depict, however fleetingly.

Below is a selection showing the inspirations for the new calendar and my finished paintings:

Patricia Briggs and George Petty

I grew up never knowing about Petty, but I admired the work of his less-expensive replacement Alberto Vargas. For all his skill, Vargas never surpassed the man he’d been hired to emulate. Petty was so famous in his day that Hollywood made a film called “The Petty Girl”. His style often involved the use of contours painted as vermillion watercolor outlines – even when they overlaid or interacted with a fully-painted figure. The discovery of Petty’s work was one of the reasons I wanted to reconsider the Pin Up, and the satisfaction of those red lines cannot be understated.

I also altered my signature in homage to the great man.

Calendars and Auto Repair

Calendars and Auto Repair have gone together since the very early days.
Because Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson is a mechanic, I wanted to create an old-school garage calendar that would (as nearly as possible) match the format of those classics where a single pin-up would be printed on a tall piece of thick cardstock and a block of 12 thin pages would be affixed below the painting for the months.

In this case, I used a permutation of Dan Dos Santos‘ logo design for Mercy’s shop (as seen on the cover of her book Iron Kissed) instead of the simpler type designs that most garages had back in the day. I made up the motto below her feet, and was delighted to find that the quote Briggs chose above was also about trust.

N. K. Jemisin and Noah Jemisin

Oree is a blind painter, an artist who sees magic and makes her own.

In this case, the artist whose work Oree’s most resembles in style and substance is that of author N. K. Jemisin’s own father, Noah.

But rather than the wonderful scenes and subjects Noah has painted, I wanted to do something that would resonate with the setting, and what better than an impressionist gloss on the cover to the very book Oree hails from – The Broken Kingdoms?

I would never have have thought to include anything like great American Impressionism in a pin-up calendar, but for N.K.’s descriptions and suggestions.

I love watching people’s expressions when Jemisin’s pin-up opens in front of them.

Terry Pratchett and Gil Elvgren

Because Terry Pratchett didn’t ask for a specific character to be portrayed, I had my fun at the expense of the Unseen University of Ankh-Morpork. I didn’t attempt a direct homage with a particular pose, but the legacy of Gil Evgren clearly informs the piece.

And while I didn’t ask model Clare Grant if she was familiar with Elvgren’s work, she embodied its spirit brilliantly:

Ray Bradbury and Robert A. Maguire

Ray Bradbury was my hero – my favorite author. Forever.

It was my amazing pleasure to speak with him many years ago in Atlanta, and an incredible honor to have him among this year’s authors.

Both Bradbury and Maguire came up in the wonderful world of pulp, and when I learned that Bradbury had chosen Fahrenheit 451 for his pin-up, I just instinctively felt that Maguire was somehow the right artist to guide my approach. The painting is informed not by a specific piece, but by a mood, a period and a focus. Like so very many of the artists I admire, the culture they worked in didn’t allow much room for cultural or ethnic variation, but I hope this piece would please both men.

Robin Hobb and Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema

Malta, the amazing woman portrayed in the calendar, is part dragon. She’s tall and thin, and partly scaled. And she has a comb like a chicken. She’s so unique there isn’t even fan art of her!

But in painting her I dredged up my memories of Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema. I didn’t break out my books, but there was really only ever one painter whose work was all about marble, silk and that certain sort of fantasy high life that got Alma Tadema derided in his time as a painter of “Victorians in Togas”.

One painting in particular ‘The Roses of Heliogabalus‘ proved an important inspiration, though my petals are intended more as festive confetti than the lovely implements of torture and death Alma Tadema intended.

Jacqueline Carey and Gustav Klimt

Phèdre nó Delaunay is not Austrian. And Klimt never knew Naamah’s service. But the sort of luxe and deeply romantic European milieu that Jacqueline Carey so beautifully describes could really only summon that lover of ladies and gold leaf – Gustav Klimt. Again, I didn’t break out any books or reference, but the goal was clear as finest crystal. And Klimt’s incorporation of geometric forms gave me a similarly clear view of how to incorporate the calendar page.

Peter S. Beagle and Alphonse Mucha

Art Nouveau was known as the “Cult of Nature”, so what better style for ‘The Last Unicorn’ herself?

And what better practitioner of the art than Alphonse Mucha?

I started this piece more outlined than it finished up, but I had Mucha in mind throughout. The iron work of the frame around the pin-up and of the Portcullis of the calendar page below it are entirely inspired by his work.

Charlaine Harris and J.C. Leyendecker

This is an homage, plain and simple.

And the piece in question is one that others have famously homaged before (Alex Ross‘s painting of the Joker and Harley Quinn is probably the most famous).

Where Harris’s True Blood characters are well known, Leyendecker’s aren’t. He was in many ways the best and most important illustrator of the last century, and his Arrow Collar Man was to his sex what the Gibson Girl (and later, the Petty Girl) were to hers. But for all that Leyendecker invented or popularized our conception of Santa Claus, the Baby New Year, the trademark look of the Saturday Evening Post – for all that he basically invented Psychedelia in 1934 – for all that he was neighbor, beacon and teacher to Norman Rockwell (who would take his place at the Post) – for all that, he was nearly forgotten. And why? Because he was gay, because the Arrow Collar Man was his lover and muse, and because Rockwell made sure that the public kept its attention firmly on Rockwell. Happily Leyendecker is being rediscovered, and his name and work restored. I hope I am doing my little part for that reclamation….

But whether or not I think Leyendecker a genius (I do), this scene of Sookie and Quinn in their specific raiment at this particular point of a party rapidly turning into a battlefield from Definitely Dead just cried out for this specific homage.

I hope this brief look behind the scenes has been as fun for you to read as for me to compile. If you’d like to order the calendar (benefiting Worldbuilders and Heifer International), please do so at The Tinker’s Packs web site.