Long before Orson Welles (as Harry Lime) was chased thru Vienna’s subterranean sewers in The Third Man, the city’s labyrinth of tunnels, waterways and culverts offered a secret refuge to many of the homeless poor.

The story of those who lived amid the squalor and effluence may have been long lost had it not been for the work of journalist Emil Kläger and amateur photographer Hermann Drawe, who in 1904 started documenting this secret world. With a local criminal as their guide, Kläger and Drawe descended into the city’s lower depths. In case of attack, they carried knuckledusters and guns—police could offer no protection here.

Drawe photographed these men huddled together under staircases, piled like stones in culverts, or wandering across the dark waters of the River Wien—lost men who lived, slept, smoked, ate, fought each other and shared dreams of a better future. Sometimes with their help Drawe would reconstruct certain scenes—a robbery, a fight—based on testimonies collected by Kläger. They also visited and documented the lives of the homeless men, women and children who lived in the Christian hostels above ground.

Between 1905 and 1908, Kläger and Drawe presented their work in a series of lectures—the photographs shown as slides to Kläger’s commentary. The authorities tried to stop them. This was not how the they wanted Vienna to be seen—this jewel of the Hapsburg Empire, the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, of waltzes, Art Nouveau, Kings, Queens, and Sachertorte.

The public disagreed. The men gave over 300 lectures. It led to the publication of a book of their work, Durch die Wiener Quartiere des Elends und Verbrechens (Journey through the Viennese quarters of crime and despair) in 1908. 
 

Residents of ‘The Fortress.’
 

Men sleep on piles of rubble.
 

Sleeping under a spiral staircase.
 
More of Drawe’s photographs, after the jump…

 
Habits often start through the comfort they give. While the tree may be up, the decorations hung and the lights a-twinkling I never feel truly festive without rereading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It’s a habit I started long ago, a ritual you might say, and each holiday I return to those opening lines:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It’s the mix of atmospheric ghost story with a deeply humanist moral that makes Dickens’ tale so irresistible. There were, of course, many other ghost stories before A Christmas Carol but none that so intrinsically linked the festive season with the supernatural.

The story of the ungrateful miser Ebenezer Scrooge finding personal redemption after a visit from three ghosts was inspired by the deleterious effects of the Industrial Revolution on the children of poor and working class families. Dickens was horrified at the conditions of the poor and originally considered writing a political pamphlet to highlight the issue—An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child—but thought that such a pamphlet would have only a limited appeal to academics, charity workers, liberal politicians and philanthropists.

After addressing a political rally in Manchester in October 1843, where he encouraged workers and employers to join together to bring social change, Dickens decided that it would be far better to write a story that could carry his message to the greatest number of people. Thus he wrote A Christmas Carol. Since its publication in 1843, it has never been out of print and its humanistic themes—to learn from our mistakes, enjoy the moment and find value in human life not things—continue to inspire generation after generation.

While I enjoy reading Dickens’ tale, I can think of no greater delight than hearing it told by Vincent Price—one of the few voices that could read YouTube comments and make them sound interesting. On Christmas Day of 1949, the debonair Mr. Price hosted a holiday special where he read an edited version of A Christmas Carol....

After the jump, Vincent Price and “the oldest extant straight adaptation” for television of ‘A Christmas Carol.’
 

 
Ray Bradbury needed somewhere quiet to write. His wife had given birth to a baby daughter and their neat home did not seem so large anymore. Bradbury couldn’t afford to rent an office, so he spent his writing time in the UCLA library. Then one day he heard the Morse code clatter of keys on rollers and discovered the library offered typewriters for hire in a basement typing room at ten cents per half hour. Loaded up with a bagful of dimes, Bradbury started work on his latest story Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury never liked to know what he was doing or where he was going when he wrote—he just hammered out the words from “the secret motives within.” It took him ten days to write Fahrenheit 451. Ten days to run up-and-down stairs and pull books off shelves to find random quotes for his book. Ten days not knowing what he was writing just following the course of the words that tumbled out of his head to tell their tale.

Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a future America where books are banned and firemen are professional arsonists who patrol the cities burning every book they find. The title Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. Books are banned because they contain ideas that make people unhappy. The firemen burn the books to keep the people happy in their safe little spaces. Bradbury’s story could be our America today, where “politically correct” college students shut down ideas they cannot handle, and where “debate” means only talking to those who agree with you.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451 in 2003, renowned artist Ralph Steadman was commissioned to illustrate Bradbury’s classic tale with his signature manic scratch and splatter style. Steadman had famously collaborated with Hunter S. Thompson on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and over a long career has illustrated numerous books, articles, and films as well as producing a vast collection of personal work. Though Steadman was said to be “jaded” about illustrating any more books, he was thrilled to illustrate Bradbury’s classic as he considered it “as important as 1984 and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment, because it’s about a fire brigade burning books.”

As someone once said, I think it was me: There is nothing so dangerous as an idea. Particularly one whose time has come…

When Bradbury saw Steadman’s vibrant illustrations, the author paid the artist the highest compliment:

You’ve brought my book into the 21st Century. Thank you.

Steadman’s flamboyant penmanship suits Bradbury’s style of writing “at the top of [his] lungs”—as both work intuitively, allowing accident and inspiration to lead them towards unknown destinations.
 

 

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

It was a pleasure to burn.
More of Steadman’s fiery illustrations for Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ after the jump….

READ ON▸

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Boeing 747-400 from Amsterdam
 
I think these marvelous photographs by prominent Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner and his son Jakob pretty much speak for themselves. They were taken at Maho Beach on the Caribbean island of St. Martin (it’s a little more than a hundred miles east of Puerto Rico)—the beach is right next to the short runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport. Since it’s on the southern, or Dutch, side of the island, it’s actually called Sint Maarten.

Josef and Jakob visited four times between 2009 and 2011, each time for about three weeks. Josef told Slate:
 

It’s an extraordinary place. There simply isn’t anything like this airport anywhere on the planet. With all the heightened security we have today, one can not get that close to a plane anywhere else without buying a ticket.

-snip-

On average, there were only five or six passengers jets coming in per day, and often there as an hour or more between the landings. It’s not like we were relaxing on the beach like other beachgoers. We had the cameras in our hands, standing on the beach, since you never know when exactly the plane is arriving. When we’d go to the restroom or go get something to drink, then the plane, which was usually late, would suddenly come in.

 
In 2012 Most Press put out a bound volume of the photographs under the title Jet Airliner: The Complete Works.
 

Corsair Boeing 747-400 from Paris
 

Delta Air Lines Boeing 757-200 from Atlanta
 

American Airlines Boeing 737-800 from Miami
 
More after the jump…

 
Punk rock documentia—and there’s been a ton of it lately, revisiting crucial scenes now that their prime movers are approaching old age—has overwhelmingly tended to focus on the reminiscences of musicians whose importance has survived multiple generations of fan consensus. Thus we get Rollins, MacKaye, and later arrival Grohl in every fucking documentary ad infinitum. (The Hard Times nailed this perfectly.) But obviously there was so much more to punk and hardcore than precious drops of received wisdom from the revered Elders of D.C., and it’s becoming increasingly rare to hear those other perspectives, from the ordinary fans and alienated kids who truly comprised the movement.

Of course, the record hasn’t been written entirely without fan perspectives; who could forget the interviews that opened The Decline Of Western Civilization? And punk kids of all backgrounds were routinely trotted out as exotica talk-show fodder throughout the ‘80s, much of which material survives on YouTube. But Disco’s Out…Murder’s In!, a new book by Heath Mattioli and David Spacone, has gone a step beyond. They’ve located and produced a memoir with an L.A. hardcore scene habitué whose story is uniquely compelling—a chieftain in one of the ultra-violent gangs that turned that city’s music scene into a war zone.

Fittingly for an L.A. hardcore memoir, Disco’s Out…Murder’s In! features Raymond Pettibon cover art, but its contents aren’t as easy to take as a Black Flag album. It’s told in a first-person narrative by its subject, “Frank the Shank,” a punk kid who rose through the leadership ranks of the La Mirada Punks (LMP) street gang in early ’80s Los Angeles. When the book reaches the point where Frank’s career approaches its peak, it regales the reader with unsparing descriptions of utterly mortifying and entirely senseless crimes—beatings, stabbings, shootings. This was one of the guys that literally ruined punk, transforming it—in L.A., at least—from a rebel youth culture and musical phenomenon into a serious threat to the lives of its participants. There are passages so viscerally revolting I actually reconsidered my opposition to the death penalty—fuxsakes, LMP stabbed a guy to death because his manner of dress was “too ska”—and yet I could not put the book down. It’s not just that there’s been no other punk document like this before; Frank’s story is riveting as a narrative of a dead-end kid searching for a place in the world, as a true crime story, as a serial killer’s candid confession, and as a dispatch from a largely uncharted shadow of American music.

In a revealing passage, Frank—not unlike a PTA mom or a tacky local news reporter, really—passes the blame for the violence off on the bands, for their violent imagery and harsh music. Later in the book, though, he does ultimately cop to his culpability:

Everybody was pointing fingers at the kids who lived brutally. Bands were upset over losing friends to the crusade, but still kept feeding it with their lyrics and sound, then wanted to cry about it? Every single band wound us up like A Clockwork Orange, yelling something violent and negative on every record. Was there one happy punk record? I don’t think so. Everyone in the scene dealt with some type of bloodshed. Most didn’t have a choice if they wanted to survive the hardcore punk scene in Los Angeles.

“Be an individual, don’t be a follower!”

Easy for you to say when you were protected on stage, or behind a typewriter, but the trenches were another story. And bottom line, we were the majority of the kids who bought tickets. Nearly all of you so-called musicians and punk rock scholars wouldn’t have lasted a minute.

If violence is art, then LMP was the Jackson Pollack of punk. Our victims, more often than not, wound up looking like one of his paintings … abstract expressions of red splatter on black cement. We definitely shared Pollack’s inability to take criticism with any sort of reasonable acceptance. How dare they! The audacity of fools, they had no idea of what we’d accomplished. —pp180-181

Too many people died at the hands of punk rock violence. I got lucky, some didn’t. As an ultra-violent punk rock gangster, I admit my part in ruining the scene. L.A. punk stood to be a magical moment of youth expression like no other and, for a little while, it undoubtedly was. The gangs ruined punk rock. I still have people telling me today that they quit punk because of LMP. Kids with talent in our scene expressed anger through music or art. We, on the other hand, took our rage and confusion out on the streets. I’m far from that person today, but as that famous Black Panther said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” —p222

Authors Mattioli and Spacone were gracious enough to spare us some time to discuss the impetus for the book and the process of crafting it:

Heath Mattioli: We had a friend who passed away, he was from a smaller punk rock gang called Lakewood Punks. His house was like a hub for dysfunctional kids, whether a punk rocker or a greaser or just some confused kid. It was a place to hang out, it had a skateboard ramp, and some LMP guys, Frank being one of them, would always go over there and hang out, and it turned out he was recruiting other guys, younger guys from these other gangs. And just hanging out with other punk rockers, talking music and pussy and whatnot, and that was where I initially met Frank. That was probably ’86.

David Spacone: If you went to punk shows you kind of needed to have backup. All of us that hung out at that house went to shows. Whether or not we participated in the whole gang thing, it really didn’t matter. As it says in the book, it was pretty dangerous, so those guys were always around at shows with us as well. That way nobody messed with us and we could just enjoy the music.

HM: I wasn’t really in the shit—a different type of shit, maybe? But I was a periphery guy, I listened to the music, but I wasn’t dedicated because I came from a more loving family, I couldn’t commit myself like these guys did, and if you wanted to be a “punk rocker” you had to put up with all that shit and I just wasn’t willing to do it. Dave was a little more in there.

DS: Yeah, I was more involved. It was OK to not be a punk rock gangster, but you had to have affiliates. But I just went to the shows for music. I was at the edge of the pit, and the gangsters were IN the pit.

Dangerous Minds: The book reads as a first-person narrative, so I take it it was written as an “as-told-to?” How much of the book, if any, represents your authorial voices, or was your function more conducting, transcribing, and editing interviews? Could you talk about your process?

HM: Our challenge was getting Frank to go back to that place mentally, to his youth. We weren’t interested in how he feels now, in hindsight. He’s a totally different guy. We didn’t want that, we wanted to hear how he felt in the moment. We would interview him in the middle of the night or early in the mornings, because he’s a graveyard shift worker. There would be times when he just didn’t want to get into it, and times where he’d talk for an hour. Answering your question of how much of us is in the book, we tried to live in Frank’s shoes and only speak the way he would speak. We had to tie things together and do our due diligence in talking to other people.

DS: What is us is how it’s stylized. We had to come up with a way for you to viscerally experience Frank’s journey through punk rock and being gangster #1.

Dangerous Minds: Frank describes active participation is some mighty repellent crimes. I’m curious how much of the specificity in his claims to criminal conduct might just be an old guy enjoying some attention and maybe exaggerating his “accomplishments?” How much is corroborated in terms of individual incidents described?

HM: The book is as close to how things went down as you could get without having a camera there. We were ferocious when it came to asking the same questions over and over, sometimes years apart, revisiting the same nights and making sure we were getting everything straight! We also asked other guys in the gang who were there, and stories were lining up. We had to dance around a little bit of the actual specifics of weaponry and maybe some street names.

DS: If you were around at the periphery at the time, all of these murders and other incidents that took place were all scuttlebutt. These were events we knew about from back in the day. Some of these stabbings and beatings and gang clashes were infamous

HM: We were bringing questions that we had as youths to the table, and Frank would say “Oh, you heard about that? Here’s how it went down…” I guess there weren’t a lot of rats in the punk world, so people hardly ever got brought in for questioning about these murders, and in Hollywood, and L.A. in general, it wasn’t patrolled like it is today, and there weren’t cameras everywhere, so these guys could do their dirty deeds and jump on the freeway and be home in bed pretty quickly after they killed somebody.

DS: One of the major reasons we wrote this book is that we were so familiar with the stories, and we knew that one day it all had to come to light. We ran into Frank all those years later, and his were the best stories to tell, he could tell the whole thing.

HM: We started out thinking we were gong to write about ALL of the punk gangs in L.A. at that time, but the more we talked to Frank, the more we realized his story was special, and so we decided to dedicate all our time to this one kid’s journey through the dark side of punk rock. So we ended up spending five years interviewing Frank. I couldn’t go to sleep so many nights after talking to Frank and hearing these horrific stories about these confused kids, who hated themselves and wanted everyone to feel what they felt. So now the reader gets to feel a little bit of that…

DS: The whole scene was really Clockwork Orange and we wanted to make the reader feel that.

Continues after the jump…

 
A new Charles Bronson book and a slew of DVD releases seem to indicate the cult of the macho movie tough-guy is ever-growing. Twelve years after his death, the actor’s legacy shows no signs of fading.

Bronson’s Loose Again! On the Set with Charles Bronson was released last month by BearManor Media. Author Paul Talbot’s exhaustive, definitive document of Charles Bronson’s work from the mid ‘70s through the ‘80s follows his previous volume Bronson’s Loose!: The Making of the Death Wish Films which specifically covered the Death Wish franchise.
 

 
Bronson’s Loose Again! indicates that the cult of Bronson initially took hold in Europe and Asia, while he was still largely unknown in the United States. According to the book, Bronson had passed on three Spaghetti Westerns which ended up making Clint Eastwood a huge star. It was then that Bronson finally agreed to appear in the European films Farewell, Friend (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Rider on the Rain (1970). These three films were virtually ignored upon initial release in America, but made Bronson a huge megastar throughout the rest of the world.

He became one of the highest paid actors in the world by the time he went on to shoot Violent City (1970), Cold Sweat (1970) and Red Sun (1971).

The Bronson phenomenon was so huge in Japan that his face alone could sell a movie—or anything else, for that matter.

From Bronson’s Loose Again!:

Red Sun unspooled in one Tokyo theater for nine months and broke the house record set by the recent reissue of Gone with the Wind (1939)—which had played for a mere four months. Nearby, a massive billboard displayed a lone image: a painting of Bronson’s cracked, mustached face. There was no text, just the visual promise that the latest movie with the nation’s favorite star could be seen locally. In 1971 Bronson collected $100,000 for four days work shooting (in Colorado) a series of TV ads for a new cologne from the Japanese firm Mandom. These clever spots by director Nobuhiko Ohbayashi (who went on to do the 1977 cult horror film Hausu) perfectly captured the rugged Bronson mystique. A few weeks after the first commercial’s broadcast, Mandom’s product was the best-selling cologne in Japan. A rival company decided to not even bother airing its own Bronson-less ad.

The hyper-masculine Mandom ad must be seen to be believed:
 

 
Bronson didn’t really break through in the United States until Death Wish was released in 1974. The controversial vigilante film cemented his stardom both in the United States and abroad. The squinty-eyed, gun-weilding, middle-aged man with the weather-beaten features became an unlikely archetype for American badassery.
 

 
Strangely, the one person unaffected by the cult of Bronson seemed to be Bronson himself. Bronson, quoted from Talbot’s book:

“I’m not a fan of myself. I wouldn’t go to see me. I don’t like the way I look and talk. I like the way I walk, but I don’t like the way I stand. I hate the way I stand. There’s something about the way I stand. I’m embarrassed at myself. I’m not embarrassed at what I’m doing. I’m just embarrassed at myself.”

Audiences didn’t seem to have a problem with the way he looked or talked or stood—then or now: Six of Bronson’s films have gotten recent Blu-Ray reissues on boutique labels: 10 to Midnight, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, Mr. Majestyk, Messenger of Death,  The White Buffalo,  Breakheart Pass... and two more titles are set to be released soon: Assassination, and Murphy’s Law.

We wrote about 10 To Midnight back in October here at Dangerous Minds, calling it the weirdest, “most fucked-up, underrated, ‘80s slasher horror movie.” It’s a MUST-WATCH for either fans of Bronson’s “cop not playing by the rules” antics or fans of homocidal maniacs in a proto-American Psycho vein.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bronson’s canon of work, or have any lingering doubts about him being the ultimate movie badass, after the jump, I invite you to bask in the testosterone of the brilliant “Ultimate Charles Bronson Movie Trailer” supercut. It’s a thing of glory…

 
I stumbled upon these fantastic covers of “gay pulp” paperbacks from the 1970s the other day and immediately became entranced with them. I saw a few of them at the blog Knee-Deep in the Flooded Victory and immediately knew I had to find out more. It turns out that these covers date from 1974 and 1975; they are from the “RAM-10” series from Hamilton House, a company about which I have no information.

It may not be apparent how unusually striking these covers are—for a nice gallery of more standard-issue gay paperback covers, you could do a lot worse than this post I did for DM a couple of years ago. You’ll see that the more usual style of gay pulp covers relies on well-nigh abstract juxtapositions of male silhouettes and that male/Mars symbol in garish colors. Not so for the RAM-10 series, which uses documentary-style photographic portraits of males dressed up as gay archetypes in front of a field of light blue or blood red, while a vertical line pierces the book’s title and author in a stately serif font. Actually, the covers remind me a bit of Gay Semiotics, the brilliantly deadpan monograph that photographer Hal Fischer published in 1977—high praise indeed.

Naturally, the blandly suggestive titles also elicit a smirk. Saddle Buddy, Holler Uncle, The Big Pipe, The Meat Eaters, Jump Squad......

All of these covers were a bit small in the formats I found them—it’d be great to get better scans of these titles. Who was the designer of these covers? Who was the photographer? I was able to get all of the covers except one—the missing volume is #102, which is E-Mission, by Chad Stuart, and that’s a shame, because according to Drewey Wayne Gunn in The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film: A History and Annotated Bibliography, that was a good one: “I particularly recommend E-Mission (1974) by Chad Stuart (William Maltese).”

One can safely assume that the names of the authors are psuedonyms, as Gunn’s quote above suggests. William Maltese, who wrote a few of these volumes, was formidable enough an author of gay pulp fiction that there is a bibliography dedicated to his work.
 

101. Tall Timber, by Wolfe Bronson
 

103. Saddle Buddy, by Tex Shulanski
 

104. Hunk, by Dick Baldwin
 
Many more 1970s gay pulp covers after the jump…

 
Earlier this year I had the good fortune to stumble upon the high-quality and criminally under-appreciated underground cartoons of Paul Kirchner, who had made his name in the 1970s and 1980s in primarily two ways. From 1975 to 1986 Kirchner produced a full-color, psychedelic comic strip set in the Old West called “Dope Rider” for High Times. Meanwhile, his strip “the bus” (the title is always set in lower case), a black-and-white comic strip about a municipal bus, appeared in Heavy Metal from 1979 to 1985.

For those who haven’t seen it, “the bus” is a gem of philosophical cartooning, a near-perfect blend of The Far Side, M.C. Escher, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rene Magritte.

In 2012 a French company called Éditions Tanibis did the world a service by publishing a book version of Kirchner’s original run of “the bus.” I own a copy, and it’s a very satisfying volume.

Sometime in the 1980s, Kirchner abandoned the cartooning game in favor of a (much more lucrative) career in advertising, but to the joy of his fans the world over, Kirchner recently started doing “the bus” strips again.

On November 25 of this year, Éditions Tanibis released the bus 2, which collects the strips that make up Kirchner’s second run of “the bus” strips.

Here is a bit of the promotional copy that accompanies the book:
 

In 2013, Paul Kirchner surprised commuters when he decided to start working again on the bus. He fixed the old vehicle up, took it out of the garage and called its iconic passenger in the white overcoat back on duty, waiting to be taken on new, exotic adventures. The bus’ unpredictable personality causes him to mimic classic pop culture icons such as King Kong or Steve Martin while in turn analyzing or teleporting his passenger. And that’s only when it’s not cheating on him with other commuters. Kirchner’s new ideas are on par with the original strips, proving that his creativity didn’t end with the 80’s. The crazy cartoon logic of the original strips is still present, and wackiness is the norm. Some details, such as the so-called “smart” phones or the passengers’ looks, root the stories in the 21st century, but Paul Kirchner’s universe retains a timeless vintage aesthetic that blends eras, lending these new stories a hint of nostalgia. The bus 2 will be published in hardcover horizontal format identical to the previous collection published in 2012. Back in that twilight dimension he calls home, it is rumored that Paul Kirchner is at work on new material for his psychedelic western Dope Rider. After all it seems that the bus’ passenger is not the only one who gets caught occasionally in strange time warps… Parts of the bus 2 material have previously been published in magazines in north America and in Europe.

 
It’s a perfect Christmas present for the underground comix fan in your life—or you can give it to your favorite bus? I don’t know either, but it does seem like a Kirchner-y way of thinking about it.

Here are a few of the new “the bus” strips. Click on any of them to see a larger version.
 

 

 

 

 

 
A Dangerous Minds reader submitted these images of a Kafka-inspired cockroach backpack without any information. First, I was instantly intrigued. Second, I had to know where to get one! Sadly, I don’t know its provenance. The text at the bottom is in Spanish and says “To go to work… with style.” At this point, I’m concluding it’s just a wonderful conceptual design. Who came up with this? I don’t know.

Now if you have to have one or want something similar, I did find this beetle backpack. It’s just not as cool as the chic cockroach carryall I posted here, though.

 
h/t Andri An

 
Are you a fan of H. P. Lovecraft? Or, maybe just seeking that perfect something for the Lovecraftian in your life? Then look no further than John Coulthart’s Lovecraftiana Calendar for 2016, which contains twelve sumptuous illustrations of some of Lovecraft’s best known creations.

Coulthart is an artist, designer, writer and curator of the website {feuilleton}—an essential compendium of his interests, obsessions, and passing enthusiasms. Coulthart earliest artwork was for the album Church of Hawkwind in 1982. Since then, he has created a splendid oeuvre of artwork for books, magazines, comics and albums—for the likes of Steven Severin, Cradle of Filth, Melechesh and many, many others. Coulthart illustrated the “definitive” edition of Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, and was involved in creating the legendary and infamous comic Lord Horror published by Savoy Books. He also has the “dubious accolade of having an earlier Savoy title, Hard Core Horror #5, declared obscene in a British court of law.”

With the Lovecraftiana Calendar, Coulthart has brought together a selection of his mixed media illustrations of such mythical figures as Hastur,  Night Gaunt, Shoggoth, and locations such as the lost city of R’lyeh to powerful effect. And if this product twists your melon, then you can order your calendar here.
 

 

JANUARY: Necronomicon (digital, 2015)

FEBRUARY: The Yellow King (acrylics on board, 1996)

MARCH: Nyarlathotep II (digital, 2009)

 
More ‘Lovecraftiana’ after of the jump…