The Book of Magic: The Soul's evolution

The Soul. Art by John Coulthart.

As you know, I am writing a series of articles, diving into The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic section by section. They are serialized on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi) and so far four episodes are available: the last one is Ben Wickey's interview, in Italian; more to come.

 

In writing the pieces I contacted some of the contributors to get, if possible, behind the scene info about the grimoire. In the following you can read what the amazing John Coulthart revealed about... The Soul's evolution!

Special thanks to Coulthart for his availability and for the permission to share his answer on this blog!

I highly recommend to visit Coulthart's official site and to follow his amazing { feuilleton } entries! 

Let's talk about The Soul. It was originally a series intended for the ABC line, wasn't it? Was any story or page fully realized, in comics form I mean? I think that back in the day they described it as "a decadent, partly computer-generated occult strip". Then it was "transformed" for the Bumper Book. Can you talk about The Soul's evolution? :)
John Coulthart: The Soul was one of three new series slated to appear in ABC Cascade, a title which Alan described as being based on the DC Showcase comic of the 1960s. The other two stories would have been Pearl of the Deep, an undersea adventure to be drawn by John Totleben, and Limbo, a story about a dead character to be drawn by Shane Oakley. Alan wrote an 11-page outline of the proposed stories for the ABC/WildStorm people; I did a few sketches to rough out ideas for the character, I think Shane did something similar for his story but the Cascade title never materialised.

Showcase #61, 1966. Cover by Murphy Anderson.

The Soul in her original incarnation was named Isla Pascal Lamb, a woman who would have been a female equivalent of the occult detectives who flourished for a while in the written fiction of the Edwardian era, characters like John Silence and Thomas Carnacki. The idea was for the writing to be a combination of detective fiction and weird tales, while the art would be an amalgam of my interest in Art Nouveau, Decadent culture and the illustrators of the years from 1900 to 1925. I was getting heavily involved in computer art and design at the time, hence the interest in pursuing this in the new story but I never developed things to a stage where the amalgam of hand-drawn art and digital art was working to my satisfaction. She would have been slightly older than she is in the book, probably mid-40s, and looking like a silent film star or one of the flamboyant aristocrats of the era, women like Ida Rubenstein and Luisa Casati. Isla was definitely more of an aristocrat than she is in the book. Alan wanted her driving around in a huge luxury automobile like a Duesenberg, with a decorative scarab beetle on its bonnet.

Luisa Casati in 1922.

Adeline Carr, The Soul in the Bumper Book, is obviously a scaled down version of Isla Lamb, a younger woman who lives in a flat above a bookshop. The story retains some of the earlier characteristics of the Cascade outline--the chapters and the story itself are all titled like weird tales--while the scarab-clad Duesenberg became Alban's smaller motor car. The original Soul had already had occult experiences whereas Adeline's story is all about her first journey into the world of magic.