Coming Atcha!!!

As visitors to the Cloud 109 blog are only too aware, your old Blogmeister has been conspicuous by his absence of late. Impervious to pangs of conscience, his keyboard has remained out of action at least as regards the cybernetic activity required to satiate the desires of some of his most loyal readers.

Has this man got no conscience?

Well actually he has and I have been feeling varying degrees of guilt but I comfort myself with the thought that it's all for a good cause.

And the good cause is nearly upon us as Illustrators Issue 1 along with The Art of Denis McLoughlin are currently being printed and bound and will be hitting these shores come August.

So here as a taster is the cover to The Art of Denis McLoughlin, plus the cover and some interior spreads from issue 1 of Illustrators.

And I think those of you who want to try this first issue out will agree (well I am hoping fervently that you will agree) Illustrators is going to be an ever better substitute for a daily blog - not to mention The Art of Denis McLoughlin, which finally does this amazing artist the justice he so richly deserves by providing a definitive collection of his work with accompanying text by the late artist along with a wonderful memoire and critical appreciation by his friend and biographer David Ashford.

The book also includes check lists of all those killer diller Bloodhound hardboiled fiction covers along with glowing reproductions of scores of covers most of which have not been seen by more then a few of his most devoted fans. Whilst his Buffalo Bill Annuals might well be reasonably familiar to a lot of collectors, there are few who have seen all his TVB noir paperback covers. Within the pages of this book you will see all of the TVB Paperback covers painted by McLoughlin, along with some really early Bloodhounds. There is discussion of his techniques and reproductions including full size details of some truly stunning originals.

McLoughlin is also the lead feature in the debut issue of Illustrators along with an interview with Ian Kennedy looking back on his over half century of working as one of this country's premier illustrators and comic strip artists, with features on the Spanish artist and doyen of romantic illustration Angel Badia Camps and Parisian artist Cheri Herouard adding further luster to the proceedings. A beautifully instructive essay by Mick Brownfield takes you behind the scenes of one of the artist's most iconic Radio Times Christmas covers.

We have got the most fantastic team of contributors on board and over coming months you can look forward to features by the artist and writer David Roach, writers David Ashford Norman Boyd and Gary Lovisi, ex Fleet Street Art Editor Bryn Havord, the writer and broadcaster Brian Sibley and host of the amazing Carol Day website and David Wright specialist Roger Clark to name but a few.

All in all perhaps not such a bad trade off after all.

We hope you will join us for the ride.


We will be giving you a sneak preview of issue 2 shortly.

The Art of Denis McLoughlin 

Illustrators #1 Ready To Print

I hope everyone enjoyed the recent Diamond Jubilee holiday weekend. As much as I enjoyed waving my plastic Union Jack it was great to find that on getting back to the Batcave, er, sorry I mean the office, I found that the digital proofs of David Ashford's marvellous The Art of Denis McLoughlin and Illustrators issue one had arrived from the printers. Editor Peter Richardson has spent the last 72 hours giving the material a final tweak before sending them back to Honk Kong with a green light to start printing.

Just as a reminder here's the new improved cover for illustrators 1. We decided  to go with this image as we felt it encapsulated the noir feel McLoughlin strove got in his T.V. Boardman crime work.

I would be remiss if I didn't try and further whet your appetite for Illustrators 1 by mentioning the feature on Angel Badia Camps by our friend David A. Roach.

 What McLoughlin did for Hard Boiled detectives and Ian Kennedy for air warfare, Camps did for Romance and Fashion with his deliciously hip (and now chic retro) styling.

 Mind you he could turn his hand to the gothic

 and draw a good "Sam Spade"

as these sneak previews readily show.

 

David's article is packed with hitherto little known information on this Spanish great.

 

Your support on these two projects is greatly appreciated Illustrators 1 is available for pre-order here with an option for a four issue subscription saving postage in the UK and The Art of Denis McLoughlin here.

 

Check back soon for more updates on the progress of these two publications and perhaps a sneak preview of Illustrators issue 2 which is almost completed as I type.

 

Have a great weekend, Regards, Dave

Thriller Picture Library cover reprints part 3

Finishing off our series of Thriller Picture Library cover reprints we come to Rick Random, one of the most popular and collectable of British comics. The Buster Adventure Library reprinted five of Rick's adventures from the pages of Super Detective Library, four of them with artwork by Ron Turner — the fifth (Killer in Space) reprinted Rick's debut adventure with artwork by Bill Lacey.

The covers of the original Super Detective Library stories were often less than inspiring or looked — by 1966 — rather old-fashioned, so a number of Jet-Ace Logan covers from Thriller Picture Library were repurposed. That the covers had nothing to do with the stories and didn't even feature the same character didn't seem to matter. At least on Buster Adventure Library 33 the editors remembered to remove Jet-Ace's R.A.F. badge and the Space Command logo from the spaceship...

Cover images of all of the original issues can be found in The Thriller Libraries index, published by Book Palace Books.

Alessandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 426

 

Arnold Beauvais, reprints SDL 37

James McConnell, reprints SDL 129

Alessandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 383

Alessandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 422

(* Buster Adventure Library © IPC Media Ltd.)

Latest News

We'd like to thank all our customers who have supported our move into periodic publication by subscribing to the first four issues of Illustrators Quarterly or by ordering the first issue. Similarly it's been very gratifying to hear all the positive comments and receive pre-orders for our next book The Art of Denis McLoughlin  . Your support is very important to us and we appreciate the commitment  given the current economic climate. There is of course still time to subscribe and take advantage of our free UK postage offer. We've kept the international rates as low as possible too despite the recent Royal Mail price hike. If you like to support us by paying now rather than on publication just say so in the comments section of your order, or use PayPal, otherwise credit/debit cards will only be charged once we are ready to ship your order.

 And so to the update...

 The digital proofs are now at the printers being given the once over. Shortly we will get a print out which will be our last chance to discover any howlers. I say this as one of five people who's proof read the Quarterly and the book so far. The observant amongst you will have noticed that we recently changed the cover for Illustrators #1. The new cover has more, shall we say va-va-voom and I think a wonderful noir feel redolent of the classic crime films of the 1940s and '50s.

I'll leave you with a sample of the stunning artwork that accompanies the Ian Kennedy

interview

and a couple of my favourite McLoughlin covers for the T.V. Boardman books.

Don't forget to come back soon for more progress reports and sneak previews.

Regards

Dave

Thriller Picture Library cover reprints part 2

Continuing our walk through the reused covers of the Thriller Picture Library, here are more examples from the John Steel series, reprinted in Buster Adventure Library a few years after their original appearance in the TPL. A full list of the original appearances along with cover images of all the originals can be found in The Thriller Index, published by Book Palace Books.

As with the previous selection, most of the reprints were fairly straightforward, although they would occasionally adapt the image... such as in the case of Buster Adventure Library 17, below, which used the same cover as Thriller Picture Library 399, above, without the spider-web.

Nino Caroselli, reprints TPL 403

Nino Caroselli, reprints TPL 399

 

Alessandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 419

 

Unknown, reprints TPL 423

 

Giorgio De Gaspari, reprints TPL 258 (ex-Spy 13)

Alessandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 407

(* Buster Adventure Library © IPC Media Ltd.)

Thriller Picture Library cover reprints

A few months ago we ran a series of covers that were reprinted from issues of Thriller Picture Library and I'm pleased to present a few more. The later John Steel casebooks were reprinted in Buster Adventure Library within a few years of their original appearance, but under different titles. Below you'll find a number of these retitled reprints — you can find the originals both listed and illustrated in The Thriller Libraries index published by Book Palace Books.

Most are reasonably straightforward reprints, but some are quite extensively adapted. See, for instance, the cover for Buster Adventure Library 11 below and compare it to the original image as used on Thriller Picture Library 379 above.

 Alessandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 355

 

 Enrico De Seta?, reprints TPL 363

 Allesandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 359

 Enrico De Seta?, reprints TPL 387

 

P. Carey?, reprints TPL 371

 

P. Carey?, reprints TPL 379

Allesandro Biffignandi, reprints TPL 424 (ex-Spy 13)

(* Buster Adventure Library © IPC Media Ltd.)

The Art of Denis McLoughlin

Peter Richardson recently revealed some of the behind-the-scenes details for the upcoming Book Palace Books publication The Art of Denis McLoughlin. Written by David Ashford, one of McLoughlin's close friends, the book celebrates every aspect of the artist's career, from examples of his earliest work whilst still in uniform to his lengthy association with T.V. Boardman, for whom he produced hundreds of dust jackets for their Bloodhound crime series and the yearly best-selling Buffalo Bill Annual.

The Boardman covers are almost unique in British publishing history as no major publisher relied on a single artist to produce so many of their jackets. But tracking down useable examples has proved to be a long and gruelling process. As Peter says: "We needed high quality scans of all the covers we sought and the logistics of having to carry a scanner and computer to spend a day getting under the feet of a McLoughlin devotee, which would have secured us a reasonable number of scans but by no means all the ones I craved gave us pause for thought. Photographing the books would have been quicker, but the results are light years away from a scan. It simply wasn't an option."

Hooking up with San Francisco-based collector Mark Terry gave fresh impetus to the book as Mark already had a network of contacts with collectors through his facsimile dustjacket business; the finished book will now contain dozens of examples, carefully restored.

The book will also contain many examples of McLoughlin's comic strips and a biography by David Ashford, as well as behind-the-scenes photos and examples of his original artwork.

McLoughlin had a unique style to his work that deserves to be preserved... and this will be a fitting tribute to his talents and seventy-year career as an artist.