In this first part of a special multi-part Halloween series, we take a look at the history of horror and fantasy illustration. This episode focuses on historical trends and developments spanning from the stone age to the early 20th Century.
REFERENCES
Tucker, I. (Ed.)(2018). FF DOT: The pixel art of final fantasy. Dark Horse Books.
Hendrix, G. (2017). Paperbacks from hell: The twisted history of ‘70s and ‘80s horror fiction. Quirk Books.
Chatziioannou, A. (2023). From ants to zombies: Six decades of video game horror. Bitmap Books.
Gianni, G. (2017). Gary gianni’s monstermen and other scary stories. Dark Horse Books.
Kochman, C. (Ed.)(2012). Mars attacks. Abrams ComicArts.
Vallejo, D. (2000). The art of rowena. Paper Tiger.
Voger, M. (2015). Monster mash: The creepy, kooky monster craze in America 1957-1972. TwoMorrows Publishing.
Jones, Stephen (2015). The art of horror: An illustrated history. Applause.
Allie, S. (Ed.)(2004). B.p.r.d.: The soul of venice and other stories. Dark Horse Comics.
Saunders, D. (2009). Rudolph belarski (1900-1983). Illustration, 7(27), 8–61.
McVittie, A. (2014). The art of alien:isolation. Titan Books.
Sadowski,G. (Ed.)(2017). Four color fear: Forgotten horror comics of the 1950s. Fantagraphics Books
Nourmand, T. & Marsh, G. (Eds.) (2006). Film posters: Horror. Evergreen.
Hodge, T. (2015). Vhs video cover art. Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.
Weist, J. (2002). Bradbury: An illustrated life. William Morrow
Boyreau, J. (2002). Trash: The graphic genius of exploitation movie posters. Chronicle Books.
Salisbury, M. (2014). Alien the archive: The ultimate guide to the classic movies. TitanBooks.
Ferris, E. (2016). My favorite thing is monsters: Book one. Fantagraphics Books.
Morton, R. (2005). King kong, the history of a movie icon: from fay wray to peter jackson. Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.
Landis, J. (2011). Monsters in the movies: 100 years of cinematic nightmares. Dorling Kindersley Limited.
Ortiz, L. (2011). Jack Gaughan. Illustration, 9(33), 2–27.
(2009). Deco devolution: The art of the bioshock 2. 2k publishing.
Humphreys, G. (2019). Hung, drawn and executed: The horror art of graham humphreys. Korero Press Ltd.
Gammil, K. & Spurlock, J.D. (2005). Famous monster movie art of basil gogos. Vanguard
Tucker, I. (Ed.) (2021). The art of arkham horror. Dark Horse Books.
D’Agostino, N. (2020). Sex and horror volume four. Korero Press.
Hulse, E. (2021). The art of pulp fiction: An illustrated history of vintage paperbacks. Elephant Book Company
Rodriguez, S. (2021). The art of goosebumps. Dynamite.
Nolen-Weathington, E. (2010). Modern masters volume twenty-four: Guy davis. TwoMorrows Publishing
Intro:
This is Incomplete Design History: The Illustration Files, a podcast that explores overlooked and ignored topics in Illustration history. It is our goal to deepen and expand the knowledge, understanding, and interpretation of design history.
Because history is messy. It’s incomplete.
Thank you for joining us today, I am your host, Sam Washburn, with Renee Martin joining me for today’s festivities.
And today is certainly a festive occasion! To celebrate Halloween, we’re using the month of October to release a multi-part series on the history of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy illustration with a special emphasis on monsters.
While it won’t be exhaustive, we’re going to cover as many topics as we can in the next few episodes, working chronologically. We’ll start with prehistoric renderings and work our way up to today, with mini-topics including the birth of fantasy art and science fiction in 1800s, the pulp novel movement of the early 20th century, the Monster Mash of the 1950s and 1960s, horror film special effects and even horror video games. As this is a favorite topic of mine, I look forward to you joining us for the discussion!
Ok, so the the sources for this podcast are varied- my office is literally stuffed to the brim with art books, comics and horror paraphernalia so for an exhaustive list of sources please refer to the website. Having said that, the bulk of research for today came from three different sources- The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History, edited by Stephen Jones, The Art of Pulp Fiction, by Ed Hulse, and Alternate Realities in Pulps and Popular Fiction, 1490-Early 2000s by Nicholas egon Jainschigg- Chapter 22 in the Illustration History textbook edited by Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove and Whitney Sherman.
Before the Pulps
Fantastic imagery in art isn’t really anything new. Since prehistoric times humanity has chiseled and painted surreal images and abnormal representations of nature. The animals in cave paintings and the small carvings of figures like the Venus of Willendorf aren’t photo-realistic. They’re squashed, stretched and disfigured.
A few centuries later, we see evidence of anthropomorphic figures, human-like beings with alligator or jackal heads in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Winged lion men in Babylonian sculptures, minotaurs on Grecian urns. These early monstrous images are stand-ins for deities and creatures that were prevalent in myths and stories from the time.
Stephen Jones, in his introduction to The Art of Horror, points out several examples of these figures; we still know the names of some of them.
Ammit, a demon depicted in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, devoured the dead and was part lion, part hippopotamus, and part crocodile.
Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon woman whose stare could freeze men in place, is littered throughout art produced in the ancient world, including unearthed murals in Pompeii. And so it goes. These mish-mashes of animals and humans continue to be made. Indeed, “anthro” art is currently its own bustling sub-genre, with characters like Medusa and Ammit appearing in blockbuster movies and tv shows.
Later and a bit north and west from the Mediterranean where we found Medusa and Ammit, emerged the traditional ghouls and ghosts that make up the Western canon in sculpture, painting, and woodblock prints and designs. With the dominance of Christianity in Western Europe, we see the rise of biblical demons and monsters in art produced during the middle ages. Demons, angels, devils, witches, skeletons, all sorts of fantastical imagery starts popping up. Even illuminated manuscripts had winged cherubs and demons. Brinkerhoff and Nishimura point out that richly sculpted tympanums, like those of the Abbey Church of Ste. Foy,completed around 1100-1200, depict sinners in hell being tortured at the feet of Satan himself.
This image is probably fairly comical by today’s standards, with a bug-eyed Satan surrounded by a cadre of demons lightly torturing sinners, but it would have been a blockbusting action scene in the eyes of the French pilgrims visiting the Abbey in the 1100’s. These early interpretations were the equivalent of today’s horror films or books. They told a story to the public, presenting a moral play. With the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the 1400s, this “picture as story” usage exploded leading to more and more fantastical and horrific imagery.
Jumping ahead to the middle and late 1400s,we see, In the work of Albrecht Durer, a lot of this type of imagery, from skeletons and demons to the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. These woodblock prints were wide-spread throughout the region and continue to inspire work. Ever seen a werewolf or demon on tv or in any of the “The Conjuring” films? The iconography and how these things look in our media now goes back to some of Durer’s prints. Ragged ghouls and skeletal visages of death date back to this time period, especially in the work of the Durer and folks like his teacher Michael Wolgemut, who helped produce the Nuremberg Chronicle with Wilhelm Pleydenwurff- a text which utilized hundreds of woodblock prints to create over 1,500 images.
These images were visual metaphors for everyday life, its rudimentary interpretations of real events, and fears the viewers would have been experiencing. Even masters like Donatello and Michelangelo painted giants, witches, devils and more. Of course, the grand master of this kind of work during the renaissance would be a particular master of the triptych.
Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), a painter from the Netherlands best known today for works like “The Last Judgment” and “The Garden of Earthly Delights” produced paintings that are the visual equivalent of Where’s Waldo, if it was taking place in a fever dream.The author Stefan Fischer wrote a book pulbished by Taschen that covers Bosch’s complete works, which provided useful information and visuals for this part of the talk. The work demands close observation, as it presents a bevy of narrative situations and surreal imagery, hundreds of years before surrealism was an established art movement. Angels, demons, bird-headed wizards, bug people, bizarre toad monsters, random rabbit headed people, disembodied heads..the list goes on and on, rewarding viewers with a cacophony of visual stimuli.
Bosch left only 20 verified paintings that we know of, but the sheer heft of the imagery has been influential for centuries. The generational impact of the work on future artists is evident in the work of Salvador Dali and, in the illustration field, Boris Artzybasheff.
Moving forward in time again, the next big historical development in horror and fantasy art was in Romanticism of the late 1700s and early 1800s. While there are more, three artists stand out: William Blake, Francisco Goya, and Henri Fuseli.
William Blake, 1757-1827, lived what could be considered the prototypical “starving artist” life. Much of his income actually came from other artists. He lived the life of an eccentric working for love of the field while not making a ton fo money while creating his work, which was typically a combination of poetry, painting, and printmaking. Blake used a special process in his printmaking that he attributed to his dead brother who posthumously taught it to Blake in a dream. The man was something of a dreamer. The subject matter of his work borrowed heavily from Biblical and mythological sources, including images of minotaurs, angels, and scenes drawn from the Book of Revelation.
Rendered with a deft combination of valued gradients and strong tonal contrast, Blake’s figures take on the appearance of giant figures on a theater stage, shifting and existing in celestial thrones and/or monumental tombs. The emotionality of the art comes from exaggerated facial features and robustly rendered anatomy combined with spouts of light and darkness emanating from the human forms. Mixed with more fantastical imagery of griffins and demonic dragons, the pictures stand out more for their emotional qualities than fine rendering attributes.This might explain why Blake was such an overlooked artist’s artist at the time, while being so popular hundreds of years later. He was ahead of his time.
Fans of horror films, particularly the adaptations of Thomas Harris’s “The Silence of the Lambs” and the famous fictional character Hannibal Lecter, may have heard of Blake’s work before. Red Dragon, the novel that introduced Lecter to the world, draws part of its inspiration from Blake's work, especially his print renditions of the Red Dragon character from the Book of Revelations.
The print itself is referenced in the second filmed adaptation of “Red Dragon”. Actor Ralph Fiennes devours a copy and has the image tattooed on his back. One could imagine that the frenetic nature of Blake’s work helped inspire some of these more absurdist ideas.
While Blake was doing his thing mixing it up through Great Britain, another artist was experiencing a change in their work. This artist, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) made his mark in the art world as a court painter for the Spanish Royal Family.
Witnessing the tragedies of war and social upheaval in Spain and then going deaf led Goya’s work to become more pessimistic. During his later life he began work on a series of aquatints that covered subjects like witches, death, and war. These collections are known as “Los Caprichos” (The Caprices), “Los Desastres de la Guerra” (The Disasters of War) and “Los Disparates” ( The Proverbs, or The Follies). The Caprices shows monsters and witches. The Disasters of War is self explanatory. The Follies shows various examples of Spanish folk-sayings, often showing arrogance run amok and other human-caused disasters.
There is a solid chance you have seen De Goya’s work out in the wild, especially his print “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” and the painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” which has been parodied and homaged multiple times over the years. This painting, which shows the frantically rendered Titan gnawing on the torso of one of his sons, is part of his “Black Paintings” series, and radiates the fear and confusion it is assumed Goya was feeling at the time. This nightmare fuel would go on to influence the tropes we still see in horror imagery.
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) was a Swiss painter who spent much of his career in London. Fantasy and horror situations were Fuseli’s bread and butter, and he was especially well regarded for his imagery of Shakespeare’s plays- as pointed out by Richard Dalby in Jones’s The Art of Horror. Another creator of paintings featuring witches and mythological characters, he is best known today for his painting “The Nightmare''. This famous image depicts a demon or troll of some sort sitting on the abdomen of a sleeping woman while a milk-eyed horse apparition appears from behind the curtain in the background. The unsettling scene has elements of surrealism and pulp sensationalism over a century before such artistic movements became commonplace. In short, it’s just a creepy image, especially in context as it was made in 1781. These aren’t traditional representations of mythical figures or biblical allegories. They’re contemporary folklore and images pulled from Fuseli’s imagination.
Considering the work left behind by these European masters, the 1800s were ripe for experimentation and continuation in terms of creating creepy imagery and fantastical scenes. The publication of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in 1818 served as something of a starter’s rifle for the creative work and imagery that would follow in Europe for the next century and change.
Before we get there, let’s hop over to Japan in the 17 and 1800s, where a different subset of fantasy and horror art was gaining momentum, and, in time, would come to have a major influence worldwide.
Toriyama Seiken (1712-1788) was an influential artist in Japan around the same time as Romanticism was capturing the fascination of European art collectors. Unlike his fellow artisans in Europe, Seiken’s work consisted of pen and ink drawings and paintings transferred to woodblock prints. He printed books, making his work wide-spread and accessible, in the same vein as later luminaries of ukiyo-e artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai.
While not as well known as these later practitioners, Seiken is immensely influential on horror and fantasy art in Japan for his collections of Yokai encyclopedias, produced between 1776 and 1784. Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt have collected and contextualized four sets of Seiken’s monster-related works in their excellent book Japandemonium. Yokai is the catch-all term for mythological Japanese monsters, ghosts, demons, etc., and Seiken presented many of these creations in an encyclopedic manner for the first time.
This set a precedent for work produced later on, up to the present day (compare it to the countless books outlining Pokemon characters bought up by millennials and their parents in the 1990s). These characters run the gamut from terrifying to humorous, and being culturally based outside the European spectrum of cultures and folklore, present imagery completely separated from the popular canon of Westerners at the time.
So, while European art is rife with skeletons and witches at this time, Japanese and Asian art includes depictions of Kappa (frogmen), Jorō-gumo (spider women), Nuppeppō (essentially human blobfish) and Kasha (basically hairy demons that dragged sinners to hell upon their death, disrupting many a burial), amongst countless others.
The images are mostly gray-scale, with strong line-work and stark uses of contrast in black white and gray used to present the figures. They closely resemble modern comic books and pen and ink illustration, in contrast to the painterly rendering of subjects in European art at this time. They’re informational, as opposed to emotional. Seiken’s illustrated collections of these monsters and ghosts laid the groundwork for a menagerie of popular culture moving forward, having a profound influence on later artists, and ultimately on cultural exports like film, manga and anime that have proven influential worldwide in the centuries since.
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Back in the western canon, the 19th century and the evolution of printing set the stage for more wide-spread literacy on the continent, which in turn led to the development of more imagery for mass consumption. Horror and fantasy rode this wave, paving the way for developments in the 20th century that mold the popular culture we experience today.
(pulled mostly from Jainschigg’s work in Illustration History) Starting around the 1830s, cheaply printed periodicals called “Penny Bloods” began appearing in London. Featuring tales of gore and violence, and accompanied by Victorian style woodcuts, these printings proved to be successful. They mutated into “Penny Dreadfuls” aimed at a younger audience, and crossed the Atlantic to America, showing up as “Dime Novels.” They not only provided the seeds for what was to come in the 20th century, but also meant work for many illustrators. Characters like “Varney the Vampire” and “Spring-heeled Jack” appeared in these publications, building on urban fears and cultural changes in a way that helped establish the conventions of modern horror and fantasy.
This wealth of new material in the Victorian era, including the publication of Dracula in 1897, would crash into the developing art movements and technological advancements of the early 20th century in spectacular fashion. There are too many innovations to cover, even for a long-narrative like this, but to briefly highlight some of the most important ideas, consider these bullet points:
imagery, and the nascent film industry, working primarily in black and white, helped develop and popularize art movements like German Expressionism.
All of this stuff going at the same time creates a witch’s brew of influences and imagery that has a major impact on horror illustration, especially the combination of wiley Gothic imagery and expressive rendering of the Expressionism Art movement. This combination of both gives us some fantastic imagery that jumpstarts the horror aesthetic we live with to this day: things like creepy mansions or Halloween decorations.
If we take a quick look back to Lynd Ward, someone we talked about in an earlier episode, we can see this combination of Gothic and Expressionist art at work. Ward is well known for his wordless novels, but it was his work on an edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as The Haunted Omnibus which was a collection of stories edited by Alexander Laing and first published in 1937.
Ward’s illustrations for these two volumes in particular were horrifying, complete with zombies and ghosts drawn in his characteristic stark black and white. The influence of German Expressionism is obvious. Grim and dynamic, the images of Frankenstein’s Monster and possessed women in the pages of these volumes crackle with menace and weirdness. Imagine film noir and Marvel comics thrown together into a blender and you get an idea of how this work looks. Ward worked primarily for higher end publishers and magazines, but his imagery can be seen as a logical point of inspiration for a slew of younger artists that would produce work for what came to be known as “The Pulps,” the medium that would lead to comic books, paperback novels, role playing game books and video games.
The Pulps and their lasting influence
(Much of the following pulled from all three books, but also general knowledge)
Most people who hear the word “pulps” today probably envision comic books or action movies, mediums spawned and influenced by the original pulps. Named for the rough, cheap paper they were printed on, pulps were the descendants of the Penny Dreadfuls and Dime Novels of the previous century and became very popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
Many popular genres, like Crime, Westerns, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror were represented in Pulps. Writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and John W. Campbell produced a litany of stories for the magazines, and the medium gave birth to such famous fictional characters as The Phantom, Conan the Barbarian and Zorro. Of course, to stand out from the pack, and it was a very large pack, publishers needed a steady supply of artists to quickly produce illustrations for the covers and interiors of these books. Two such artists were well known in their day and are still admired decades later.
Virgil Finlay (1914-1971) and Hannes Bok (1914-1964) both produced work for Pulp magazines, and the influence of work like Ward’s on the art they produced is pretty obvious. Finlay was most well known for his black and white interior work, and created a distinctive horror look using stippling and scratchboard (which is similar to etching, a black surface carved to reveal the white underneath) that is sufficiently creepy and atmospheric. The stippling Finlay used in his illustrations vibrate with energy from the sheer look of the material. Though only black and white, the combinations of dots, marks and scratches create transparencies and luminescent effects that photography would struggle to emulate, all while keeping the inky contrasts of light and dark that made Ward’s work so successful.
Concurrently, Hannes Bok was also using pen and ink to produce striking imagery used in the pulps. Mostly self-taught, Bok made a mark in sci-fi illustration, creating alien worlds and cultures that heavily evoked surrealism and used stippled rendered and morphed forms and figures. A healthy dose of gothic imagery also made up a prominent part of Bok’s legacy. A renowned talent and favorite of connoisseurs like Ray Bradbury, Bok got something of a revival in the 1990s, when his work was rediscovered. However, since then fervor about Bok’s work has cooled somewhat, which of course could mean that at any moment this pulp artist’s singular vision could be rediscovered by new fans.
Beyond the work of just Finlay and Bok, the pulps are best known for the vibrant covers produced by a small army of working artists primarily based in New York. These covers oozed color and action with subject matter running the gamut of imagery we recognize today as part of pop culture. Collections of these covers include aliens, pinups, astronauts, robots, murderers, spaceships, demons, skeletons, dragons, gangsters, femme fatales, torture devices, gorillas and more. Some standout practitioners included Walter M. Baumhofer, Rudolph Belarski, George Rozen and Norman Saunders, who will get quite a bit of attention from us in the next episode.
While many of these artists' names have tragically been lost to time, the work they produced retains a dynamism that still radiates from the page today. Produced quickly, the colored covers of the pulps combine scenes of action with asymmetrical layouts that present bombastic mixes of light and dark value. This look would go on to be termed the “pulp” style by the aforementioned Heller and Chwast and would have a major influence on both horror, fantasy and action art produced afterward, expanding beyond the world of magazines.
The pulps would also go on to influence movie posters like Universal’s 1932 film The Mummy as well as the creation of comic books, the marketing of toys and cards, and more as time would go on. While eventually replaced in terms of popularity, reprints and collections of pulps continue to be published at boutique presses to this day.
With the explosion of interest in pulps cresting in the 1940s, our story moves on to new topics that will be covered next time, including the comics code, the rise of trading cards, and the Monster Mash of the late 1950s and 1960s.
Credits:
This episode was produced with the aid of a grant from the University of Central Oklahoma
Research & Writing credits for this episode are from – Sam Washburn, Assistant Professor of Design at the University of Central Oklahoma
Story editing provided by Spencer Gee
Sound design/engineering – By the University of Central Oklahoma’s Center for eLearning and Connected Environments
Music by Christina Giacona and Patrick Conlon of Onyx Lane
Contact:
If you would like to contact me about this episode or about the podcast please email me at Hello@idh.fm That is HELLO@idh.fm
Our website can be found at idh.fm
You can also connect with us on Instagram @incompletdesignhistory
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