On Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide

The twelfth episode in my series of articles about The Bumper Book is online on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi). 

It contains behind the scenes by John Coulthart about Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide sections. Read the following to get it all!  

Can you talk about your work for both Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide section?
What's about the approach, the process, the main difficulties you had to solve to balance text and image, and your favourite pieces...? Any anecdote or "odd" event while you worked on those illos? Can you share any preliminary or wip material?
John Coulthart: Magical Landscapes was the last part of the book to be completed although I did prepare all the borders early on, and I also fully illustrated the first page so that everyone could see how the section would look when it was finished. I left the section to last because there was so much illustration involved, I wanted to get everything else out of the way before immersing myself in the task.

The Spirit Guide was done earlier than this, and mostly in a collage style since a lot of antique pictorial reference was required: angels, the De Plancy demons, the John Dee "Watchtower" and so on. I thought
using collage might also save me some time but some of the pages took longer than I expected. I have plan illustrations of all the Dee Watchtowers in a booklet about Enochian magic where they're shown as simple line drawings but Alan and Steve wanted the chart to be one of the colour versions which I think were created by The Golden Dawn. All the online copies of these are small things in very over-saturated RGB colours so they're no use for print purposes. The only option was to make my own copy of one of the Watchtowers from scratch. Most of this has been covered over by the text but the whole design came in useful when I had to do the Enochian page for the Magical Landscapes.

Both sections were relatively easy to work on since the appearance and contents of each section was carefully described in the notes. The Magical Landscapes frame is based on an Alphonse Mucha design, the request being for pages that resemble Mucha's early illustrated books where framed illustrations are paired with panels of text. Mucha's books change their frames for each page, something I did consider for my sequence but for this book it seemed a better option to keep the shape of the frame consistent while changing the contents.

Alan had also provided small thumbnail sketches for each of the Magical Landscapes pages so one of the challenges was trying to stay as close as possible the guidelines. This worked well for most of the pages with the exception of Geburah where the sketched design had two narrow text panels running down the page with the figure between them. I tried several variations for this but in all of them the columns of text were crowding the figure who required space for her outstretched arms. The solution was to follow the form of the previous page, which also makes for a satisfying double-page layout, with two multi-armed figures facing each other. I also changed the Daath text panel from a rectangle to a  circle since the text refers to Daath having pi as its numeral on the Tree of Life. Readers of Alan's other books may note that some of the imagery in the first eleven pages matches the symbolism that appears in the journey up the Tree of Life in Promethea. I don't think this was deliberate, more a result of the way that Alan imagines these spheres.

The biggest challenge was the request for the Fairyland page to be as crowded as one of Joseph Noel Patton's paintings which show hundreds of fairies and other creatures of all sizes and shapes gathered together in woodland scenes. My scene is crowded but seems less so when you look at Patton's paintings, each of which must have taken him about a year at least to create. I'm still pleased with the way my scene turned out, however. There's a tiny reference to Richard Dadd's fairyland in the figures from The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke. And I put an old view of Northampton in the background of the alchemy picture on the opposite page. This picture is based on the plates from the Splendor Solis series, many of which have little landscape scenes in their backgrounds.
Since I was doing the same here I   thought I might as well use something relevant. I don't think I have any specific favourites but I like the way these pages look together, one of them visually noisy and detailed while the other is very calm and ordered.

The Enochian page presented another challenge since the description required a perspective view of one of Dee's Watchtowers, showing how the grid is formed by an arrangement of coloured pyramids with flat tops.
This was another reason for drawing out one of the Watchtowers for the Spirit Guide page; doing so gave me an accurate plan of the whole design in print-ready colours and with all the required Enochian symbols in place. This was done with vector graphics in Illustrator before being placed into the layered page. I use Illustrator all the time for design work, and usually find it easier and quicker when creating anything involving bold shapes or geometric constructions.

 

[Regarding wip material] I've included extracts from the work-in-progress files for the Enochian pages. I'm usually reluctant to share sketches for the reasons that David Bowie once gave: sharing early stages of something has a tendency to change the reception of the final work, whatever it may be. But these drafts are more like diagrams, and they already exist outside the work as a whole. [See below!]

The Soul, Tarot and an iridescent perspex box

The eleventh episode in my ongoing series of articles about The Bumper Book has been posted on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi) today.

It's a new chat with the great John Coulthart about The Soul, Tarot and special editions! Enjoy! And... Grazie mille, John, for your generosity!

The Soul chapter 3, the sexual ritual episode. Was it a difficult chapter to illustrate?
John Coulthart: No more so than any of the other chapters.
 

What's about your decision, apart for the opening illustration, to draw small, vaporous, sketchy illustrations inscribed into a circle? Was it a way to communicate a sense of intimacy to the reader? I am curious also about the crescent moon and triangles dynamic included on the upper part of the pages.
I wanted to vary the style and layout of each chapter a little in order to create variety and also parallel in a small way Adeline's magical progress. The setting of Alban's studio suggested a sketchier drawing style while also avoiding the illustrations being too explicit. I've no qualms about doing sexually explicit artwork but such a thing wouldn't have been right for this particular book.
None of the documents for the Soul story gave any indication as to how the chapters should be illustrated so the symbols at the tops of the pages are my own addition, something to once again indicate the magical dimension as well as the different characters. The intersection of the triangles of Water and Fire are referred to in the text so I developed this into iconic representations of Adeline and Alban's sexual encounter. Adeline's inner life is represented by the Moon; the Water triangle is her external life. At the end of the chapter the two haven been joined, something made possible after the earlier conjunction of inner elements (Sun and Moon) and outer elements (Water and Fire).

In chapter 4 you are back to a more classic illustration approach. I can also feel a bit of Finlay vibes in the full page Moon palace illustration, even if it's in colour. Can you talk a bit about this fourth section?
The most novel element in chapter 4 was the border which was adapted from a versatile Viennese artist and designer, Koloman Moser. The border is another element from the Art Nouveau period but it's an unusual design that's sufficiently abstract to lend itself to different interpretations. The elaborate border also compensates for there being fewer illustrations in this chapter. I didn't want to extend the page count needlessly but I did want to have that full-page picture of the Moon palace. I wasn't thinking of Virgil Finlay's style but the drawing is certainly the closest one in the book to typical fantasy illustration. 

 

What's about the simplified Tarot deck that you designed? Originally, if I remember right, there were plans for an actual brand new Tarot deck to be included in the book or as a separate item...
Yes, José Villarrubia was going to be doing a complete Tarot design for the book when it was first announced in 2007. I think one of the ideas was to have the cards printed in such a way that they could be detached from the book and used as an actual deck of cards. In addition to spoiling the book the production costs would have escalated if this was the plan since the cards would have to be printed on heavier stock then perforated around their edges. As it turns out, Alan and Steve subsequently decided that inventing an entire deck of cards with 78 unique pictorial designs is a major task in itself, especially if you want to try and add anything to the vast corpus of imagery that already exists in the history of the Tarot. Alan later said to me that he didn't really think the Crowley/Harris deck could be easily improved upon, not unless you spent years working on the new designs to the exclusion of everything else. 

All of this left me with a problem when I came to design the book. The removal of the cards cut down the page-count considerably yet we still had an essay about the Tarot which needed to illustrated. After considering a couple of options such as trying to licence cards whose designs are still in copyright I decided to use two decks simultaneously: one of them very old and the other--my own designs--very new. This had a number of advantages: in addition to showing how the Tarot iconography can work in different ways the designs show the two main arrangements of the Major Arcana, one with the older, Christian icons like The Last Judgment, the other with the Crowley arrangement which updates some of the cards. The Marseille cards, incidentally, were coloured by myself from an old set of black-and-white prints.

Expanding this idea of separate items... well, sure the book is fantastic.. it's a real, amazing, colourful grimoire with that British flavour of old children annuals... but I was daydreaming about a version of the Bumper Book as... a Magic Box full of books, printed objects of different format and design. Maybe the complete The Soul story as a single small hardcover book with a Victorian cover and all your illos... the Alexander comics as a comics newspaper... the enchanters as a single french format comic album... and so on... a bit like Ware's Building Stories... What do you think about it? Was there ever a time, a preliminary brainstorming moment, when you considered a different format/package for the Bumper Book? 

I did make a jokey comment to the publishers about a future special edition in an iridescent perspex box with ceremonial robes and so on. Even though I like special editions and unusual packages I think I prefer the book being the way it is, especially when it was designed to be read as a single work. Adeline's magical evolution takes place while you're reading about the evolution of magical practice through the ages, and also being offered tips to your own practice in the Rainy Day chapters. The book ends with a recapitulation and summary of the contents which then describes the magical evolution of the authors. To borrow a favourite reference point of Alan's, it's like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album: you can extract individual songs but the songs themselves work much better in an album format with a definite beginning, middle and end.

A bit of Soul 2

 

The 7th episode in my ongoing series of articles about The Bumper Book has been posted on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi) few days ago.

Below, you can read the extra info that John Coulthart sent me, included in the Italian piece. Enjoy! And... Grazie, John! 

The Soul episode 2. I really like the rounded shape of the "strip" images... and the psychedelic feel. We have a Lovecraft reference in the title. And we have also recurring things, like Adeline on the background of "The Discovery of the Archetypal World" illustration seen in a previous section of the book...
John Coulthart: I was also left to my own devices with the Soul illustrations so I decided to vary the presentation slightly for each episode. Since the second one involves a psychedelic ritual I started out with black-and-white line drawings which colour creeps into before exploding in the ritual sequence. I'm not sure where Alan got the title "Discovery of the Archetypal World" from, I think it may be a misattribution since the drawing originally appeared in one of Camille Flammarion's books about astronomy as an illustration showing how the medieval world regarded the cosmos. It does work as an occult illustration, however, so I don't think the misattribution is a problem.

Sabbath on a Rainy Day and the Tree of Life

Art by Émile Bayard

Due to personal issues, I am a bit late with new pieces for the series about The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, serialized on Italian web-magazine (Quasi) .

So, below, you can read the extra info that the great John Coulthart sent me some weeks ago, included in Italian in the last, sixth article posted on (Quasi). Grazie again, John!

Rick Veitch created a bunch of illos for the first part of "Things to do on a rainy day" and for the other parts the graphic side was on you. How did you manage this? How did you pick the accompanying images? Which are you favourite ones? Did you receive any indication from the Moores about that?
John Coulthart: The first Rainy Day section was the only one with any planned illustration, nothing had been decided for the other sections. At the outset I suggested asking Rick to do more illustrations but Alan didn't think it right to continue using drawings of kids in the sections concerning sex magic, drug-taking and so on. So this was another area of the book where I was acting as art director, choosing images with some connection to the contents. The first picture I chose was the full-page illustration of a Sabbath scene by Émile Bayard from Histoire de la Magie (1870). I'd tracked down this illustration several years ago after seeing it erroneously attributed to Gustave Doré and was curious about the origin. Once I'd decided to use this for the Rainy Day sequence I decided to fill out the rest of the chapters with similar antique imagery to give these sections a consistent feel. At the very end everything comes full circle with another picture of two junior magicians which I adapted from an illustration in an old magazine.

What's about the Kabbalah section? How did you approach such a fundamental section? I feel a "keep it simple" approach in terms of the associated images. I really like the change of color to indicate the related Sephiroth in the tree graph...
This was much more like doing something for a text book so the decision was to present the basic elements of the Tree of Life in a clear manner. The full-page illustration is very detailed, and probably rather confusing at first sight for people who haven't seen it before. I created the small single Sephiroth illustrations to go with the text in order to show the very basic arrangement of the ten spheres from each every other part of the philosophy derives. When you're learning about the Kabbalah you have to learn the names and positions of the Sephiroth before anything else. Once their arrangement is clear then everything follows from this. 

(Continua...) 

Bits of Magic

Art by Steve Parkhouse

As you know, I am writing a series of articles about The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. They are serialized on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi) and so far four episodes are available.

In writing the pieces I contacted some of the contributors to get, if possible, behind the scene info about the book's making-of. 

In the following you can read what I got from Steve Parkhouse, who drew the amazing In the Morning of the Mind comics, and Rick Veitch who created some great illustrations for the first part of "Things to do on a rainy day" section.

Steve Parkhouse: I'm sorry to disappoint - but I have no background stories for you concerning Morning of the Mind. Bear in mind that I drew the strip sixteen or seventeen years ago so it's not really fresh in my mind. I appreciate your kind comments, but the story contains no revelations that I could discern. Since none of us were there at the time, the events depicted were obviously speculative. All the usual problems for an artist were predictable: where to find reference for giant deer, neolithic communities, credible landscapes etc. In other words, how to make the story come to life. 

I was never entirely sure of Alan's intention for the story itself. I formed my own interpretation: that everything in the universe is a fractal of the universe, and consequently natural forms tend to echo each other. That'll have to do.

Rick Veitch: I drew my illustrations over fifteen years ago and all I got to read at the time was the chapter I was working on. So no stories about the rest of it. I really loved finally reading it though. 

Veitch also mentioned The Bumper on his True-Man The Maximortal N.1 book released in August 2024. See the picture below:

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.

The Book of Magic: cover and... Cthulhu

The Bumper Book of Magic cover. Art by J. Coulthart.

I am currently trying to write 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 two episodes are available (more to come, I hope. Don't hold your breath!) In Italian, of course.

 

In writing the pieces I also contacted some of the contributors to get, if possible, behind the scene info or extra bits of magic to include in.

In the following you can read what the great John Coulthart revealed about the cover, the magical alphabet and... Cthulhu. 

Special thanks to Coulthart for his time and kindness. Grazie mille!

John you created real magic for the book! And grazie ancora for the permission to share your original answers on this blog!

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

John Coulthart: The cover evolved from a request from Alan for something with the following elements:
a) the stylistic appearance of an old children's book (or "annual" as they're known here).
b) a central image showing a boy from the first half of the 20th-century holding a Tarot card in one hand and a wand in the other.
c) The title and names of the authors.

A very simple request compared to some of the covers I'm asked to create. The main task was finding a suitable figure for the central image. I could have drawn something myself but old illustrations have a unique quality, they always bring something of their own time into the present day. The boy was taken from a larger illustration on the cover of an American magazine of the 1930s. The first draft of this which I created in 2007 wasn't very successful compared to the version which appears on the printed cover. At the time I could only find a very small image of the original illustration--in 2007 there were fewer archive sources available--so I had to enlarge a small jpeg then paint over it using the mouse. It never looked bad but I was never wholly satisfied with the result. When I started work on the final layout in 2021 one of the first things I did was find a better copy of the cover boy. The image still required doctoring but this was easier to do with a larger picture and the drawing tablet which I now use every day. You'll notice that the final version has more definition than the earlier one, also the badge which I added to the artwork to make the difference between the old and new versions more evident. Everything else about the cover--the stars, the border (which features tiny moons and snakes)--was my own design.

Old version of The Bumper Book of Magic cover. Art by J. Coulthart.

    A note about "annuals". An annual for British readers was (and still is) a book published once a year, usually a large-format volume with a hard cover which would appear shortly before the Christmas season. 100 years ago children's annuals were often expensive productions but by the 1950s they tended to be printed on cheap paper and the contents weren't always very good. Even though The Bumper Book is for adults only, the intention was to create something that would look like the best annual a child could possibly receive as a Christmas gift.   

The alphabet was one of the first Moon and Serpent creations to emerge from Alan and Steve's magical explorations in the 1990s. I'm not sure when they put it together but some time in the late-1990s Alan sent me a computer print-out which showed in a rather crude form the layout of the letters as they are in the page, a grid with coloured letterforms and all their attributions. I'd already been playing around with fonts when I was asked to design the CD package for The Highbury Working so I scanned the shapes of the letters from Alan's pages then made them into a workable font which I used on the Moon and Serpent CDs and their accompanying posters.

The alphabet page was the first addition of my own to the book as a whole, this wasn't something listed in the original contents. I wanted to include it because it explained (at last) the alphabet I'd been using on all the Moon and Serpent CDs. I was always impressed with the alphabet which is why I was so eager to incorporate into the book. As well as being an early product of the Moon and Serpent project it's a clever condensation of a wide range of mythological and occult symbolism into 24 letters. It also looks like nothing but itself--it's not trying to emulate the appearance of older magical alphabets--and it really does work as an alphabet. Despite the unusual shapes of some of the letters the whole thing is relatively easy to read. Grimoires of the past (eg: Francis Barrett's The Magus) often contained pages of magical alphabets so this follows the tradition form while also adding something new to the idea of the magical alphabet. 

Art by J. Coulthart.

   Regarding Cthulhu, if you look at the attributions you'll notice that there are 12 male symbols and 12 female ones, so Cthulhu has been given a female assignation. I don't think terrestrial sex or gender designations can be applied to Cthulhu which is more of an "it" than anything else, and in the original Lovecraft story turns out to have a mutable form. Characters in the Cthulhu Mythos refer to Cthulhu as "he" but this seems more of a convenience or tradition than anything else. As for the letter, the utterance of Cthulhu's name isn't too far from the sound of "Q", while the attribution to Daath is part of Alan's theory that Daath is a kind of Lovecraftian abyss, something you see in the Magical Landscapes section of the book as well as in issue 20 of Promethea.