Outer Aliance Spotlight #41: John Coulthart July 3, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #41. Each week the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is artist John Coulthart.
John is a gay artist and writer based in Manchester, UK. He designs and illustrates books and comics as well as creating CD and DVD cover art, and original visual art. His Psychedelic Wonderland 2010 calendar was featured on Boing Boing, and inspired his cover art for Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic #4. He has work on display as part of the A Love Craft exhibition at Observatory in Brooklyn, New York, which will be open until the 23rd of this month.
Though he doesn’t read as much science fiction as he used to, John feels indebted to the genre for giving him queer characters he could identinfy with as a teen. He’s an Outer Alliance member because of that, and because he believes LGBTQI visibility is important. John maintains a Twitter feed and blogs on his personal site.
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OA: The cover for Dodgem Logic #4 is a beautiful and striking Art Nouveau image. How did you come up with that design concept, and what was the process like?
JC: Alan Moore enjoyed the Alice in Wonderland calendar which I produced last year and which had a psychedelic theme. Issue 4 of Dodgem Logic is a kind of psychedelic special so he asked if I could supply a suitable cover image. Many of the psychedelic artists of the 1960s borrowed styles and motifs from the Art Nouveau era and I’m very familiar with the culture of both periods so it seemed natural to bring them together.
Since I had carte blanche I wanted to be a little provocative. I’d discovered the work of Yannis Tsarouchis a month or so before; he was a Greek painter, very well-regarded in his native country, who produced a lot of homoerotic work including a number of pictures of men with butterfly wings. So the idea was to throw a lot of butterfly and peacock motifs together and see what worked. Having two guys kissing gave it an edge which takes the cover away from being just a pretty picture. If you had two women kissing I doubt anyone would notice. A picture of two men kissing is still a great provocation for some people so the idea was to make that an unavoidable focus of the design. Alan Moore was fine with this, he’s always been a big supporter of gay rights. The magazine is called Dodgem Logic because it’s “colliding ideas to see what happens” so that was the approach I tried to take.
I found a suitable photograph of two guys and did a large outline drawing based on that. If you’re working with vector graphics you need strong, clear outlines so I often draw things first at large size then scan them and convert them to vector shapes. After that it’s a case of colouring things and shuffling them around in Illustrator as you might do with cut-out pieces of paper. The butterfly woman on the back cover was also a drawn outline, based on Frank X Leyendecker’s “Flapper” cover for Life magazine. The logo which I based on Roger Dean‘s lettering styles of the 1970s was done half on paper and half in the computer at a very large size to ensure all the curves were perfectly smooth. I was obsessed with Roger Dean’s album cover art when I was 14 but this was the first time I’ve ever imitated his lettering designs.
OA: You designed the Thackeray T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, and you also contributed a piece of short fiction to it. Have you written any other fiction?
JC: Well, since you asked…yes, I have, rather a lot of it but this is the first time I’ve owned up to it in public. The Lambshead piece was just a throwaway idea but I began writing fiction when I was 16 and was doing so more-or-less constantly up until the age of about 24. I started out writing fantasy then lost interest in that and produced a lot of very dense and reader-unfriendly prose influenced by Modernist experiment and speculative fiction of the sort found in New Worlds and the Dangerous Visions anthologies. When I’d left school in 1979 I actually had more of an ambition to be a writer than an illustrator since writing fiction is personally creative whereas illustration is always subordinate to the work of another. I’d also decided to avoid art school and was told by everyone that I’d never have an artistic career because of this. In 1985 I was halfway through a very condensed surrealist novel heavily influenced by J. G. Ballard when I realised no one would ever want to publish it and I’d be better off concentrating more on the art side of things. So I abandoned the novel and started work on what became my series of H. P. Lovecraft adaptations. If I’d not had an aptitude for drawing or painting I definitely would have persevered with the writing. It’s just at that point I’d lost interest in writing stories but didn’t have a strong enough idea for a longer work.
That was then. By 1999 I’d produced 270 pages of the Reverbstorm comic series with David Britton and also put together the book of my Lovecraft work for Oneiros Press. I was in the mood to start something fresh and I wanted the new project to be completely my own, not an adaptation or a collaboration. I’d had a half-formed novel idea in mind for some time so in 2001 I started writing again, this time creating a very dark, urban fantasy which, in atmosphere at least, owes something to the Reverbstorm comics. I spent six years working on one novel and I’ve spent another four years working on the follow-up which is now halfway through. I have a UK agent who’s currently trying to sell the first book; not anyone I’d known previously, her interest came through a blind submission.
I’ve been quite resolute in not mentioning this recent work at all until now for a couple of reasons. The first is that it seems insufferably presumptuous to have a career going in one area and blithely announce to the world that you’re branching out into new territory with no indication of having done anything before in this direction. People are understandably sceptical about such moves. The other reason was that I was only going to make an announcement when I had something concrete to announce, rather than telling the world that its surplus of unpublished books had increased by one. As it turns out the agent has had difficulty selling the book, not because it’s necessarily bad or uncommercial–we’ve received praise from editors–but on account of the sex content. This has happened three times now and I’ve been rather surprised by the reaction, especially since I didn’t set out to create something that was wildly transgressive. I should emphasise that it’s not gay sex which is being rejected–there’s a minimum of gay stuff in the first one–and I haven’t tried to write Naked Lunch 2 or anything. It seems to be that my imagination is too weird and nasty for publishers. Or something. You’d have to ask them.
So that’s where things stand at the moment. This isn’t a dilettantish endeavour, I’m as serious about this new work as I am about anything I’ve ever done. Probably more so, since it took me twenty years to reach a point where I could create something which felt wholly my own. Congratulations, you’ve outed me as a writer!
OA: A Love Craft is an exhibition of artwork inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s writing. What is your relationship with Lovecraft’s work? Do you have a favorite piece? How did you decide what to contribute to this show?
JC: As mentioned above, I spent ten years on and off producing the comic strip adaptations and illustrations of Lovecraft which became The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions. The impetus was a desire to see Lovecraft treated seriously in illustration form. Many of the comic strips based on his work at that point were either jokey or rather inept and didn’t give any conception of the cosmic nature of his stories. I tried to create the kind of book I’d want to read myself.
I’m not sure which is my favourite piece. I can tell you the three which people seem to like the most. The colour pictures of Cthulhu and R’lyeh have been very popular, and both have been used on reprints of Lovecraft’s own fiction. And many people seem to appreciate my depiction of poor Wilbur Whateley’s demise from “The Dunwich Horror”.
I didn’t have to make a choice for the show, fortunately, Dylan Thuras of Observatory approached me with suggestions of the works they’d like to feature.
OA: You and Alan Moore are planning a new graphic project called The Soul. Can you tell us anything more about that? Or about any other new projects we might look forward to?
JC: This is one of those unrealised projects which haunts the CV. The idea was originally to do a comic strip for the books Alan was producing for ABC in 2000. The Soul would have been an occult detective, a kind of Belle Epoque female equivalent of Carnacki the Ghostfinder, John Silence and others. Alan was pretty overworked at that time so it never got off the ground but the idea has recently transmuted to being an illustrated story for the magical primer he’s been writing with Steve Moore. That’s also stalled at the moment, partly because of Dodgem Logic.
I have two more books I’d like to see in print. The novel is one, of course, the other is the complete edition of the Reverbstorm comic series. Savoy Books are still planning to publish the latter although given their sluggish schedule I can’t say when it might appear. People will wonder why someone else couldn’t publish it but it’s a controversial and frequently experimental series and we’ve been assured in the past by other companies that they’re not keen. It’s frustrating since I don’t really want to do anything more with comics and that work is the best thing I’ve produced in the medium.
Aside from that I’m still designing things for Tachyon and there’s more titles due from them which I’ve worked on, mostly doing interior designs although I’ve done a cover for a forthcoming Joe Lansdale collection. One of the new books is Steampunk Reloaded, the sequel to the Steampunk anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer which will have quite a lavish interior.
OA: As a teenager, you read a lot of science fiction because it wasn’t afraid to explore queer themes, gender-swapping, etc. Were there any stories you found particularly important or influential?
JC: Yes, many stories. The subversive quality of sf throughout the 1960s and 1970s is rarely mentioned but for a decade or so it was a very potent thing. I think Michael Moorcock‘s work was the first to catch my attention. Many of the characters in the Jerry Cornelius stories are bisexual, Karl Glogauer in Breakfast in the Ruins has an homosexual encounter, and so on. The impressive thing in the work of Moorcock and other writers such as Samuel Delany was the way the sexuality of the characters was taken completely for granted. There was never the slightest trace of hand-wringing or angst of the kind which was common in feature films and TV dramas. That seemed to be one of the great values which sf had as a genre, it could turn social mores upside down or inside out and have everyone behave as though things were fine.
As far as turning things upside down goes, one story which really made an impression was a story by Rachel Pollack called “The Second Generation” which appeared in a short-lived sf mag in 1978. It’s quite a simple piece, almost a fable, about a teenage couple who regularly use pills to change their sex. This happens immediately so it’s almost a magical process. The story isn’t concerned with the technology, it’s more about the couple’s relationship and how they cope when the gender swap goes wrong. A friend at school pronounced this “disgusting”; I said nothing because I was secretly fascinated by these characters who were our age. I was rather thrilled at the idea of being able to change sex at will, and by the matter-of-fact same sex description. I’ve never had a great urge to be female at all, I think it was the idea of sexual fluidity which fascinated, and being able to step out of rigid gender roles. There was also description of imaginary sex organs which was quite unprecedented. Eventually the pair in the story decide to remain the boys they were born as so it comes out gay in the end.
A year or so after reading that, the editorials in New Worlds anthologies pushed me to find William Burroughs’ work. I fell in at the deep end with The Ticket that Exploded which just happens to contain some of his more overt sf scenarios, he even swipes an idea (which he credits) from Henry Kuttner. I was fascinated again, as well as rather appalled and it took some time to admit why these books and stories were so attractive and what they were stating for me that I couldn’t fully articulate for myself. (I was a late developer; can you tell?) In Alan Bennett‘s TV play about Marcel Proust, the author has a discussion with his housekeeper about books. Alan Bates plays Proust and at one point he says the following:
“Every reader while he’s reading is a reader of his own self. A book is merely an optical instrument, a lens, which the author offers the reader to enable him or her to discern what, without the book, they would never have perceived in themselves.”
That’s what I’d discovered by reading sf. And Proust’s words are a perfect description of the value of writing as art, even when that art is being presented as merely another form of entertainment.
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Thanks, John! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out John’s website and Dodgem Logic #4!
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