A Post that Points to the Archives

Just a quick post here in response to a couple of things. First, I was sad to learn that Ronald Searle had died. For a look at his excellent and wide array of book cover designs, please see here, with follow-ups here and here.

Then there was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Charles Addams, which Google celebrated on the search home page, and which sent a startling number of visitors to this collection of his book covers.

I'll be raising a glass to the memory of these two great, bleak, scabrous cartoonists.

Fish, Barrel, Gun: Tutis

For a self-styled "caustic" cover critic, Tutis is the gift that keeps on giving. They show an interesting willingness to appopriate other people/publisher's cover art for their own shoddy POD editions.

Example #1: This is the Larry Elmore cover for the first of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis's wildly-popular-in-the-1980s Mormon-propaganda, sub-Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons spin-off novels:



Here are a couple of Tutis's classics:




Setting aside the complete inappropriateness of these covers (though at least they Photoshopped out the dragon), this is the unwise theft of a cover which millions of people will recognise.

Example #2: When Weis and Hickman started writing their own sub-Tolkien Mormon propoganda that wasn't affiliated with Dungeons & Dragons, the first cover looked like this:



Enter Tutis:




Example #3: Trashy fantasy novels seem to be a useful resource for Tutis. Here's the cover for one of the bestselling Terry Brooks' many, many Tolkien-"inspired" novels: again, a book cover seen by millions.



And here's Tutis's edition of The Man Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures--remember, by the way, that said man-eaters are actually lions, not made-up airborne monsters.



Example #4: This Tutis Wilkie Collins make use of a Charles Addams painting of the Addams family home.



Example #5: Why reuse other people's covers when you can reuse your own, whether or not they suit the book at all (though who knows where this image came from originally?)




With their usual care and attention, they've left off the author's surname on that second book--it's actually by P. G. Wodehouse. But what is that thing? Look into its cold, dead, pink eyes...



Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!

The Old Thrill of Suicide: The Book Covers of Charles Addams

The cartoonist Charles "Chas" Addams (1912-1988) is, of course, best remembered for the family bearing his name which he created in a series of cartoons for the New Yorker. The various characters who shared a haunted house, originally without names but given them for the spin-off TV series, quickly garnered lasting popularity. Addams himself was a talented and funny man who did his best to live up to a reputation for grotesquery and outrageousness.


A good selection of cartoons from one of his books, Monster Rally, is up at the fantastic Golden Age Comic Book Stories, from where I stole these three fine, characteristic cartoons. (Click for readable versions.)





Addams also designed a number of book covers, which is where we come in. As well as the covers for his own books...











..he also did a number of cover designs for similarly-minded writers.










I would love to see an edition of Waugh's The Loved One ilustrated by Addams throughout. If any artist was to find death no barrier to producing new work, it would surely be Addams.

Regarding that Ray Bradbury book, above, an interesting bit of trivia. Originally, Addams and Bradbury were going to collaborate on an imaginary family history about a clan of gothic monstosities: the 'Elliott Family'. The project never got off the ground, but Bradbury went on to write about the Elliots in From the Dust Returned (finally published in 2001 with an old Addams cover), while Addams preliminary sketches for the Elliots ended up morphing into the beginnings of his Addams Family characters.

UPDATE: Yet more Addams goodness can be found at The Hairy Green Eyeball. Now that's a sentence.