Artful Problem-Solving: An Interview with Mick Wiggins

Last week I posted a quick survey of the beautiful work of illustrator Mick Wiggins. Mr Wiggins was kind enough to agree to be interviewed for this blog, so I started off by asking about how he creates his art. (For all book covers below, click for bigger versions.)

“First, I should note that I am basically an illustrator, and have not been asked yet work on a cover design. Sometimes the illustration has to work within existing design or format, or the designer will bounce off of the composition of my image. Often, I don’t even see the cover design until its ready to go to press.

The original artwork for Gerald Durrell's Menagerie Manor

“Starting out years ago, I painted with oils, but eventually shifted to a digital format back in the 1980s. As the technology matured over the decades, my style drifted to its current state. Technically, I feel like I work pretty simply: sketching in pencil first, scanning, and building the image in Photoshop. As a hangover from the previous century, I still use a mouse (as opposed to a tablet stylus), which is probably the source of the screen-print or woodblock feel for much of my work. With a mouse, one kind of carves shapes, rather than drawing them, which takes away the immediate and sensuous line that drawing by hand gives. Any sensuality that does come through seems to have a slightly more formal, starchy feel.

“I have a couple of sources of textures I use: most commonly an old piece of papyrus that has a peculiar weave I like. I’m liking the random noise generators these days, and the textures that can be derived from them.

Details of some of the textures from Mick's work

“In the use of textures, I am mostly interested the opportunity to throw in flecks of different colours in a field, rather than suggesting or imitating another medium. The flattened use of that kind of tonality does suggest screen- or block-printing of course, and it’s pretty obvious—to me, anyway—the influence that Japanese woodblock art plays in my work. I can never get enough of not only Hokusai and Hiroshige, but the whole floating world canon.

“I love working on book covers: the pace and focus of cover development for a book is far different to that, say, of a piece for a magazine or product. All of which fits my personality, I’m finding.

The original artwork for Nicola Upson's Angel with Two Faces

“I really prefer to read the books I work on, which strangely enough surprises many of the designers with whom I’ve worked. Seems a rather minimal requirement to me. That said, even with a few years of experience with the market, it's still kind of mysterious to me: there are marketing, editorial, authorial and sales issues whose gears grind behind the scenes—or at least out of my view— all of which can dictate the visual direction eventually taken. There's no doubt in my mind that some of the best covers for the Steinbeck series were left on the drawing board for reasons I can’t figure.



“The Steinbeck gig was about as dreamy a gig as an illustrator can hope to land: 24 covers to date, I think. It was not difficult in the sense of inspiration—he’s so good at evoking mood, and his settings are described so beautifully—but the flop-sweat for me was intense. Steinbeck's such a classic figure in the literary landscape and bookshelves, delivering art that disappointed was not an option.



“Fortunately, Paul Buckley, senior designer at Penguin, knows how to lean in and back off as an art director, which resulted in a pretty good batting average for the set, I think. Since Steinbeck's writings were a diverse lot, the danger for me (besides failing), was whether they would hang together as a group. My ‘style’, such as it is, can drift in odd directions, and I’m frequently inconsistent in a ‘look’. Anyway, if there is any consistency within the series, well, I got lucky.



“On the other hand, once I worked on a series of regional detective novel covers that became increasingly difficult to illustrate, due to the sameness of the story formula from book to book: same character, same location, and not a whole lot of variation. Not so inspiring.

“All that said, as an illustrator I sometimes feel I am more a craftsman, perhaps a cabinet maker, than an ‘artist’. There is an assignment, there's a purpose and there are forces above to be pleased, all of which can trump my own personal tastes. But I like the process of problem-solving artfully, and like to think that is one of my strengths as a professional.

The original artwork for Andrew Martin's Murder at Deviation Junction

“My dream job? Easy: Mark Twain. Most immediately what comes to mind are his travelogues—this would be a cover and chapter illustrations for Roughing It, or The Innocents Abroad. Give it to me!

“Currently there are no book projects in front of me, but I am staying afloat on other freelance assignments. When the inspiration and the time happens, I like to work on my own projects.

“I have three picture story ideas in development, with no commercial potential that I can see. Nevertheless, I am very drawn to the potential of a story told with a stripped down narrative and the use of formal compositions, as opposed to, say, the multi-panelled graphic novel/comic book stylings). This could work in print form, but perhaps more ideally as a video with soundtrack. I've been mightily impressed with the 1962 short film ‘La Jetee’ which used still photos and narration to tell a mesmerizing and mysterious tale eloquently, and I’m thinking this holds a lot of possibilities with all of the new media platforms coming into use.

The original artwork for Andrew Sean Greer's Story of a Marriage

“The sound projects that I have on my site are just little personal vacations that I enjoy now and then—‘found’ sound that is reframed and shaped a bit, no matter how crudely sometimes, can be oddly transporting and powerful. In the ‘Dieter Talfdum’ story you mentioned, I used one of the recordings for the soundtrack, which was very satisfying. I really hope to pursue that direction in the near future.

The original artwork for Nicola Upson's An Expert in Murder

“One of the drawbacks of being an illustrator, for me, is the difficulty of enjoying my own work. It’s so much easier to spot the flaws and experience the burn of missed opportunity than simply enjoying a job well done. I spend so many hours in front of an image in process, that I can become somewhat numb to what the picture does exactly: the feeling, mood, whatever, if that makes any sense. But I think that’s a pretty common experience amongst illustrators, and part of the whole craft is to have the discipline to work through those difficulties.”

Thank you, Mr Wiggins!

(For a little more on 'La Jetee' and books, see the end of this post.)

Quickie Follow-Up

Two brief things. First of all, in answer to my query about whether Hesperus Press still exists, I'm told by one who works there that "We are still very much in business – our website is currently being redesigned and will be launched very soon."

Secondly, when I posted a whole bunch of peculiar covers with gorillas on them, I neglected to include Six-Gun Gorilla, rediscovered by Jess Nevins, and described by him like this: "the Six-Gun Gorilla appeared in Adventure and Wizard in 1926 (I think). I do not know who created him. O'Neil was an actual gorilla, who had been trapped as a baby, brought to the States, and sold to Johnson, a Colorado prospector. Johnson, a kind man, treated O'Neil very well. He also taught O'Neil how to dig, fetch firewood, haul up buckets of water, cook, clean, and (oh dear) load and fire a revolver. Naturally, when Johnson is murdered for what he knows about "the great motherlode," O'Neil ooks revenge. He straps on a bandolier and two six-shooters and begins tracking the thieves across a hundred miles of Colorado mountains and badlands. He picks them off one by one, meanwhile discovering a talent for holding up stagecoaches and using them to chase fleeing gunmen."

Rejoice in the majesty of O'Neil.

Mick Wiggins

Will of A Journey Round My Skull directed my attention to the website of book designer and illustrator (and composer) Mick Wiggins, who is responsible for the covers of the Neville Shute reissues coming soon for Vintage Classics--I had been wondering who had done them.





Wiggins has done a lot of other lovely work, including the complete John Steinbeck from Penguin Classics US...







..as well Gerald Durrell's backlist...






..and various other works.



When visiting his site, you also have to watch the disturbing short animated film from which this image comes, 'The Strange Tale of Dieter Talfdum, County Taxonomist, on the Day of an Unusual Geomagnetic Event'.



I've got an interview with Mr Wiggins coming up soon.

Books & Albums

The new edition of Elaine Dundy's The Old Man and Me from NYRB (an excellent, uncomfortable book based on her affair with Cyril Connolly) makes use of a cover image which has also been an album cover.




That's nothing, though. Try this photo, by whom I cannot determine, which features on at least three book covers and four album covers. UPDATE: The hugely smart ijsbrand informs me that the image is "a woman floating in Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida, by Toni (Antoinette) Frissell, and it was published in Harper’s Bazaar in December 1947."










This is Frissell's self-portrait from 1935, 'I'd Rather Stalk with a Camera Than a Gun'.

Icy

I'm part way through Sarah Moss's Cold Earth (published by Granta), a possibly post-apocalyptic tale about a bunch of grad students trapped on an archaeological dig in remote Greenland, while the rest of the world seems to be succumbing to a horrible super-virus. It's well done so far, but having the first 100 pages narrated by a convincingly drawn neurotic pain in the arse who it's difficult to want to spend time with may have been a bit of a tactical mistake on the author's part.

In any case, it's the cover I'm here to talk about.



Designed by Mark Swan, it has extra detail you can't see from this scan--spot-varnished root patterns growing out across the white from the central text block. Even better is the way that the edges of the pages are dyed a cyanotic blue.


This means that, as you read, each page has the visual effect of a slab of white ice rising up from an cold, clear blue sea.

I can't think of any other recently published book that has had page edges dyed in this way, but it's a surprisingly effective design element.

UPDATE: Alan Trotter informs me that "Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y and PopCo have their pages dyed like this (black and blue, respectively)." (UPDATE 2: See his picture here.) And Thomas has a blurb on the front of this book. It's a dyed-page-edge conspiracy!

UPDATE 3: John Self brings back some causticity to this post in his comment, but also tells me that "Andrew thingy's [Davidson] The Gargoyle had black-edged pages hardback, and Tim Willocks' The Religion had red ones."

UPDATE 4: OK, obviously this is not as rare as I thought. Now Tom of book designers The Parish points out the design on Charlie Higson's Hurricane Gold: "The hardback ... also has gilded edges, and they are in gold. With nice embossing on gold foil on the cover, it's all gold!" And it is:

Because Sometimes You Just Need to See a Lot of Demented Books with Gorillas on the Covers...

Because Sometimes You Just Need to See a Lot of Demented Books with Gorillas on the Covers...







(Yes, I know he's technically a (or rather THE) robot gangster, but he LOOKS like a gorilla.)

Faber & Faber & Faber & Faber...

My most recent purchase of book porn is Faber and Faber: Eighty Years of Book Cover Design (which I first mentioned here).



This is a lovely, oversized (roughly A4) collection of images of Faber's covers from 1929 onwards. The text is minimal, but there are hundreds and hundreds of pretty pictures to look at. Excuse the photographs (which you can click for much bigger views), but there was no way I was killing this thing's spine with my scanner.





The book itself had its cover designed by Neil Gower, mimicking the classic work of Berthold Wolpe, who did pretty much all of Faber's covers for some 35 years (as well as designing Albertus, the font used on this and many other earlier Faber covers).







Faber, at least in its earlier decades, did not have the range of cover art of, say, Penguin, due in part to having one designer with a consistent vision, but there are plenty of gems here.

My only criticism is that Connolly seems to lose interest after about 1980, and there are hardly any covers from the last 30 years shown here. This means that there are few of Pentagram's covers, and, weirdly, absolutely none by Andrzej Klimowski. It was Klimowski's covers for the work of Milan Kundera that first caught my eye and drew my attention to Faber back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when I was a young lad for whom the combination of literature and naked women was pretty much irresistable.



(For Klimowski doing Wodehouse, see here.)

Spines on a Cover, and a Query

It's a book I'm unlikely to read because of various literary and political prejudices, but the cover of Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club is appealing. (Though I think actual little plastic soldiers, rather than digitally added little real soldiers, would have looked a bit better.)



As a book from Penguin/Allen Lane, they've slipped in quite a few Penguin spines in that lot.

On another note, does anyone in Britain know whether the publisher Hesperus Press still exists? Their website is "being updated", their blog hasn't been touched since April, their various social network sites are gathering dust, and all of the books they were going to publish over the last few months, including this one discussed earlier, remain unavailable.



This, by the way, is obviously not one of those promised "more substantial posts" I was on about last time.

Bits & Bobs

Just a couple of semi-random things to look at while I work on some more substantial posts (or at least that's my story).

First, I've recently discovered the comics work of writer/artist Jordan Crane. As well as producing various one-off graphic novels and comics, he has an occasional ongoing series called Uptight, which features his graphic short stories. I especially like his sense for eye-catching cover design. Click for bigger versions.








Secondly, some more cover image duplicates, just because I keep finding them.

Making Your Own

Here's an excellent idea stolen from Alan Trotter's ≥ blog. Like many people, I have a backlog of things stumbled across on the internet that look as though they'd be really interesting if I ever got around to reading them, but which are longer than I want to read on-screen. Trotter suggests putting them all together as a one-off print-on-demand book. A fine idea, which I have just finished doing, as an experiment in using the Lulu POD system.

My own version contains a mix of articles, short stories and artwork gathered from all over the place. Now, instead of these things sitting on my hard drive, forever unread, I'm looking forward to having a physical book to read (allegedly I'll have it in about a week). Of course, this also allowed me to indulge in a bit of cover design.

This is what the book should look like (more pictures when it arrives). Click for bigger.



The cover image is a photo I took of one of the residents of our backyard, a bluetongue lizard, and the title was suggested by his/her rather judgemental look. This lizard (which is about 30cm long) likes to come out and sunbathe during the day, but then has to deal with our cat, who is compelled by lunatic instinct to rush past it at regular intervals, tagging it nervously with a paw in passing, and then getting the hell away before getting a savage gumming.



UPDATE: Alan Trotter points out that the original idea comes from Thoughtwax.

"They Make Lady Chatterly and Lolita Look Like Lambs!'

That blurb (with a characteristic mis-spelling of 'Chatterley') comes from a book called 5 Wild Dames! This book came to my attention when I was complaining about the way some "authors" lend their names to other writers' work. The most recent egregious example is the book allegedly co-written by Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, The Strain, which was actually entirely written by one Chuck Hogan, working from a 12-page "treatment" of del Toro's. I couldn't help feeling that there is no less inspiring a name, literarily speaking, than 'Chuck Hogan'.

That was until Big Bob Tralins was brought to my attention.



The author photo on the back is truly grand in its awfulness. The readers of these books might have been operating on the moral and mental level of masturbating chimpanzees, but I don't think that having the writer pose as one was the best idea.



Tralins had a whole sewer of books to his credit.






Amongst these titles, Jazzman in Nudetown has an almost inspired anti-genius to it.

For close analysis of a relatively restrained Tralins cover, The Chic Chick Spy, you must go here.

Suckers Kissing in Scottsboro

A duplicated cover image with the main difference being an arm amputation.

The Woodcuts of Simon Brett

There is a lot of received wisdom in the publishing industry about what does and doesn't sell:

* Short stories don't sell.

* Translations don't sell.

* Poetry doesn't sell.

* Slim books don't sell.

Thus, a slender book of translated Russian short stories in verse is an obvious money-spinner. Fortunately, publisher David R. Godine ignored the financial side of things, and put out Antony Wood's translations of a number of Alexander Pushkin's narrative poems, The Gypsies.



This gorgeous little book features a number of woodcuts by engraver Simon Brett. Here's a sample (click for a bigger version) from 'The Golden Cockerel'.



Brett is great. He's done a lot of work in the past for the Folio Society; here's a selection.

For George Eliot's Middlemarch:



Marcus Aurelius's Meditations:



Aristotle's Ethics:



Cicero's On the Good Life:



Lucretius's On the Nature of Things:



John Keats (soon to be cinematically fucked up by Jane Campion!):




Henry Fielding's Amelia:



and Legends of the Ring:

* * *

Further reading: a different set of Pushkin illustrations, including Ivan Bilibin on 'The Golden Cockerel'; plus the woodcut geniuses Lynd Ward and Fritz Eichenberg.

Penguin Hoax

Just a brief one for now: a forthcoming (September 2009) book about the history of literary hoaxes, by Melissa Katsoulis, is to have a nicely faked Penguin cover, being actually published by Constable & Robinson. (Click for a bigger version.)



Designer details to come, if I can work them out.

Many Marilyns

Here's another of those images that is much used on book covers: the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses (and suspiciously close to the end), taken by Eve Arnold.





A different photo by the same photographer of the same subject reading the same book was used on the cover for the Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, which I particularly enjoyed as it had a lot of (excellent) short stories, and relatively few extracts from novels.




Novel extracts piss me off no end; they seem so pointless (and this is one of the reasons I no longer read Granta magazine--most of their new fiction turns out to be bits from novels in progress). If you want to read the book, read the whole book, rather than a segment that was never designed to be read in isolation.

The worst offender in this regard from recent years is the Vintage Book of War Stories, which is in fact nothing of the sort. It's actually the Vintage Book of Extracts from War Novels, containing only one single solitary self-contained story, and that one only a couple of pages long.



Circling back to the topic of Marilyn Monroe and cover duplications, see this cover for what used to be just called the Faber Book of Blue Verse.



While the same image being used on another cover is not that unusual...



..it's the first time I've seen an unrelated image being used on both a book cover and a movie poster.



UPDATE: The wise ctorre points out that "You boys don't know your Marylin. Arthur Miller confirmed that she had indeed read Ulysses, and that she wanted more of Molly Bloom." So I stand corrected.