John Coulthart

Last updated

John Coulthart
John Coulthart.jpg
BornJohn Coulthart
(1962-03-15) 15 March 1962 (age 62)
England, UK
OccupationGraphic artist, illustrator, author, designer
GenreScience fiction, fiction, non-fiction, occult, horror, steampunk
Notable works The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions, Lord Horror: Reverbstorm

John Coulthart (born 15 March 1962) is a British graphic artist, illustrator, author and designer who has produced book covers and illustrations, CD covers and posters. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed Lovecraft-inspired book The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions which contains a collaboration with Alan Moore entitled The Great Old Ones that is unique to this book and also has an introduction by Alan Moore. [1]

Contents

He has been updating a daily blog entitled cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms since February 2006 and also uses Twitter.

He was nominated for a British Fantasy Award, for Best Artist, in 2005. [2] In 2012 he won the Artist of the Year award at the World Fantasy Awards. [3]

Design and illustration

In the music field, he has designed promotional art and CD covers and packaging for the heavy metal group Cradle of Filth, Hawkwind and Steven Severin. He also created the poster and cover art for spoken-word albums by writer Alan Moore.

Within the field of literature, he also worked with Colin Wilson and on a lavish Savoy Books edition of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus . [4] He has designed the covers for many contemporary Steampunk novels.

He designed (and contributed an entry to) the anthology work The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases and also its sequel The Thackery T Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities . He has also produced numerous cover illustrations for Arthur Magazine .

Comics work and adaptation

He has done much work based upon the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, adapting "The Haunter of the Dark", "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" to the page. His adaptation of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" done as 10 pages of collages appears as the last story in volume 2 of The Graphic Canon .
He is also noted for illustrating the Lord Horror comic book written by David Britton, produced by Savoy Books and republished as a 344-page book entitled Lord Horror: Reverbstorm in February 2013.

Other work

Coulthart has also provided card art for the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering .

In 2006 he designed the film posters and the entire DVD packaging and menu interface for the documentary feature film The Mindscape of Alan Moore .

Coulthart has also designed the cover art of the album "Steps of Descent", by the death metal band Cyaegha. The album is based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft.

He contributed 30 film reviews and 4 essays to the book Horror: The Definitive Guide to the Cinema of Fear. He has done illustrations and the cover design for The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore. The book is due to be published by Top Shelf Productions sometime in the near future. Other future projects include a series of novels the first one of which is entitled Axiom.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Moorcock</span> English writer, editor, critic (born 1939)

Michael John Moorcock is an English–American writer, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, who has published a number of well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">M. John Harrison</span> English author and critic

Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories (1971–1984), Climbers (1989), and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006) and Empty Space (2012).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Corben</span> American illustrator and comic book artist (1940–2020)

Richard Corben was an American illustrator and comic book artist best known for his comics featured in Heavy Metal magazine, especially the Den series which was featured in the magazine's first film adaptation in 1981. He was the winner of the 2009 Spectrum Grand Master Award and the 2018 Grand Prix at Angoulême. In 2012 he was elected to the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (2003) is an anthology of fantasy medical conditions edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts, and published by Night Shade Books. A second edition was published by Spectra in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Fantasy Award</span> Literary awards for science fiction or fantasy

The World Fantasy Awards are a set of awards given each year for the best fantasy fiction published during the previous calendar year. Organized and overseen by the World Fantasy Convention, the awards are given each year at the eponymous annual convention as the central focus of the event. They were first given in 1975, at the first World Fantasy Convention, and have been awarded annually since. Over the years that the award has been given, the categories presented have changed; currently World Fantasy Awards are given in five written categories, one category for artists, and four special categories for individuals to honor their general work in the field of fantasy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gahan Wilson</span> American author, cartoonist and illustrator (1930–2019)

Gahan Allen Wilson was an American author, cartoonist and illustrator known for his cartoons depicting horror-fantasy situations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Whelan</span> American fantasy and science fiction artist

Michael Whelan is an American artist of imaginative realism. For more than 30 years, he worked as an illustrator, specializing in science fiction and fantasy cover art. Since the mid-1990s, he has pursued a fine art career, selling non-commissioned paintings through galleries in the United States and through his website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Aldridge</span> British artist (1938–2017)

Alan Aldridge was a British artist, graphic designer and illustrator. He is best known for his psychedelic artwork made for books and record covers by The Beatles and The Who.

Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, and teacher currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. He has described his work as "de-genred" fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virgil Finlay</span> American pulp fantasy, science fiction and horror illustrator

Virgil Finlay was an American pulp fantasy, science fiction and horror illustrator. He has been called "part of the pulp magazine history ... one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative art work for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time." While he worked in a range of media, from gouache to oils, Finlay specialized in, and became famous for, detailed pen-and-ink drawings accomplished with abundant stippling, cross-hatching, and scratchboard techniques. Despite the very labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of his specialty, Finlay created more than 2600 works of graphic art in his 35-year career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philippe Druillet</span> French comics author (born 1944)

Philippe Druillet is a French comics artist and creator, and an innovator in visual design.

<i>A Voyage to Arcturus</i> 1920 novel by David Lindsay

A Voyage to Arcturus is a novel by the Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. An interstellar voyage is the framework for a narrative of a journey through fantastic landscapes. The story is set at Tormance, an imaginary planet orbiting Arcturus, which in the novel is a binary star system, consisting of the stars Branchspell and Alppain. The lands through which the characters travel represent philosophical systems or states of mind as the main character, Maskull, searches for the meaning of life. The book combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. Described by critic, novelist, and philosopher Colin Wilson as the "greatest novel of the twentieth century", it was a central influence on C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, and through him on J. R. R. Tolkien, who said he read the book "with avidity". Clive Barker called it "a masterpiece" and "an extraordinary work ... quite magnificent".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Moore bibliography</span>

This is a bibliography of works by British author and comic book writer Alan Moore.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mojo Press</span> Defunct American small press

Mojo Press was a small press which primarily published science fiction, horror, and western books and graphic novels between 1994 and 1999.

Michael Butterworth is a British author, publisher and campaigner who first became known publicly as an author of New Wave science fiction. He later founded the publishing house Savoy Books with David Britton in 1976 and the contemporary art journal Corridor8 with Sarajane Inkster in 2009. He successfully fought a charge of obscenity against Britton's controversial novel Lord Horror during 1992, the first novel to be banned in England since Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1967.

Alan Marshall Clark is an American author and artist who is best known as the illustrator and book cover painter of many pieces of horror fiction. He was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel for his 2005 book Siren Promised.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Picacio</span> American artist

John Picacio is an American artist specializing in science fiction, fantasy and horror illustration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann VanderMeer</span> American publisher

Ann VanderMeer is an American publisher and editor, and the second female editor of the horror magazine Weird Tales. She is the founder of Buzzcity Press.

Jill Bauman is an American artist. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award five times and nominated for the Chesley Award several times. Her art has been exhibited at the Delaware Art Museum, the Moore College of Art, Art Students League of New York, the NY Illustrators Society & and the Science Fiction Museum of Seattle. Bauman has created hundreds of book covers for horror, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, and best selling books including 23 of the Cat Who... books by Lilian Jackson Braun during the 1980s and 1990s.

Sam Shearon, also known under the pseudonym and credited / published also as Mister Sam Shearon is a British dark artist born in Liverpool, England. Specialising in horror and science-fiction, his work often includes elements inspired by vintage tales of monsters and madmen, dark futures, post apocalyptic genres including cyberpunk and industrial wastelands and classic literature including H.P.Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and the modern classics Clive Barker's Hellraiser and the Books of Blood all of which he has fully illustrated.

References

  1. Jones, Stephen, and Fletcher, Jo (December 1999). "The British report", Science Fiction Chronicle 21 (1): 34–37.
  2. (October 2005). "British Fantasy Award Nominees", Chronicle27 (9): 12–13.
  3. ""2012 World Fantasy Award Winners"". Archived from the original on 5 December 2012.
  4. Moorcock, Michael (31 August 2002). "Review: Science fiction: The alienness of atmosphere: Michael Moorcock welcomes back one of the great originals: A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay", The Guardian , p. 29.