ILLUSTRATION

1. From the Beginnings to 1978 The historical function of art in sf has been to illustrate rather than interpret; this reflects the hard-edged nature of early GENRE SF itself, which portrayed technics-dominated society rather than interpreting its raisons d'etre; just as this kind of sf was popular science plus human- or wonder-interest, so the illustrations were there to provide page-interest. When these functional attitudes weakened, sf illustrations became freer, aspiring to illumination rather than diagram. Today their relationship to text is often generic rather than specific.Before the SF MAGAZINES, there is little that can be regarded as pure generic sf illustration, though the art history of that early period of sf publication awaits research. Inspiration was derived on the one hand from black-and-white masters ofgraphic pun, such as Jean Ignace Grandville (1803-1847), Richard ("Dicky") Doyle (1824-1883) and the astonishing Albert ROBIDA, or specialists infuturistic WAR like Fred T. JANE, and on the other hand from more "serious" artists, such as Gustave Dore (1832-1883) and John Martin(1789-1854). The latter in particular, the first artist of the immense, has had great influence; his mighty visions were natural material for Hollywood, and echoes of them abound in, for instance, the original KINGKONG (1933).The other matter upon which the first generation of sf illustrators could rely was the spate of pictures of scientific and engineering marvels appearing in the press; a later generation turned to NASA handouts. Many drawings in Hugo GERNSBACK's early magazines inparticular can be traced directly to sawn-down or blown-up versions of the Eiffel Tower and the thermionic valve or tube. Such illustrationsaccompanied stories which were often cautionary in nature: scientific experiments could result in DISASTER; interstellar gas and renegade planets were hazards in Earth's path; ROBOTS were prone to rape inventors' daughters - but still TECHNOLOGY had to go on. The illustrations were diagrams to enforce the thesis, and often set over a line or two of actual text.Yet the subservient role of the sf artist is by no means the whole story. Even in the most commercial period it was recognized that the impact of the cover sold the magazine or paperback; in consequence, care and money went into the cover art. Some artists worked at their best on covers not just because the pay was better. Dedication was a more noteworthy characteristic than artistic excellence among this low-salaried breed of men.Because of printing deadlines some publishers, particularly those with a "stable" of magazines, commissioned covers before stories. As a result, a writer might be asked to write a tale to fit a picture; this doubtful privilege gave the writer his name on the cover but could also entail a cut in the already mean rates of payment.In this way, magazine art developed and became, even if in small compass, a tradition, with names of prolific illustrators like Frank R. PAUL, Virgil FINLAY and Emsh (Ed EMSHWILLER) dominating the field. Interior art became increasinglyless tied to text, just as text became less tied to technics. It was free to indulge in the pleasantly hazy symbolism of a Paul ORBAN, the immaculacy of an Alex SCHOMBURG, or even the whimsicality of an Edd CARTIER. It was also at liberty to fudge on the detail in which members ofthe previous generation of illustrators, such as Frank R. Paul and Elliott DOLD, had gloried. Increasingly, the magazine covers symbolized the spiritof the magazine rather than depicting an incident in an actual story; the series of covers Emsh executed for GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION in the early 1960s provides a noteworthy example of this.Increased paper and productioncosts in the 1940s hit the PULP MAGAZINES hard; as they dwindled, the COMIC book - which grew out of comic strips - rose in popularity. HalFoster (1892-1982) had started the ever-popular Tarzan strip in 1929, in the same year that BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, drawn by Dick CALKINS and written by Philip NOWLAN, appeared on the scene. What Tarzan did for Africa, Buck did for space. Success bred imitators: the 1930s brought thecaveman ALLEY OOP, a sort of anti-Tarzan (by Vincent Hamlin), The Phantom (Lee Falk and Ray Moore), BRICK BRADFORD (Clarence Gray and William Ritt),and the much admired FLASH GORDON, elegantly drawn by Alex RAYMOND. From such SUPERHEROES it was only a step to the king of them all, SUPERMAN. Created by Jerry SIEGEL and Joe Shuster, two sf fans, this character beganlife in a comic book, Action Comics, in 1938, and was a success from the start. Like Flash and Buck before him, Superman went into RADIO and then into films. By 1941, the fortnightly comic-book version had reached a circulation of 1,400,000. The day of the superhero had dawned. MARVEL COMICS introduced The Fantastic Four in 1961; since then Marvel's fabulousbut fallible beings - The Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Silver Surfer and the rest of the grotesques - have changed the nature of comicsand, on the whole, improved the standard of draughtsmanship in the field. But the most astonishing developments came from France, in particular fromthe group of artists (of whom Philippe DRUILLET was one) working for the magazine METAL HURLANT. Here the mood was of brooding unease rather than action; sophisticated surreal effects were achieved without recourse to balloons or commentary.As the written word affected artwork, so artwork influenced the written word. There was a period in sf when interiors of SPACESHIPS were vast, shadowy, and echoing; they came complete withcast-iron doors opening directly onto space and equipped with doorknobs for handles. That was the influence of Calkins's Buck Rogers. Raymond's Flash Gordon had similar effects, and his line of galactic romance, withproud queens dressed in fur-tipped boots and haughty expressions, and usurping villains lurking behind the arras with axe and ray-gun, is with us yet. The enormous vacuum-vehicles of Christopher FOSS spring from A.E. VAN VOGT's epics - and will surely inspire future van Vogts.Imitation ispromoted by systems of tight deadlines and tighter payrolls; whatever comes to hand must be used. Artists, like writers, still borrow heavily from each other. In the jungle world of the pulps, artists moved easily from one genre to another, depending on the corporation employing them. We should be surprised not that there is so little individuality but that there is so much. Hubert ROGERS, ASF's chief artist throughout much of the 1940s, produced many covers for other STREET \& SMITH magazines; FrankKelly FREAS, an ASF illustrator of infinite jest, created Mad Magazine's lunatic optimist Alfred E. Neuman ("What, me worry?").In the magazines of the early post-Gernsback period the mode depended heavily on horror and GOTHIC, perhaps because here was a convention readily to hand, waiting tobe adapted. Finlay, Lawrence (Lawrence Sterne STEVENS), Hannes BOK, Alexander LEYDENFROST and Cartier are names that spring to mind. Theseartists of the macabre secured and kept a great following: Finlay and Bok in particular have become revered since their deaths. Leydenfrost, son of a Dutch illustrator, produced some of the most imaginative MONSTERS in the business; they are frequently based on insect morphology.Later sf artists were able to forge an idiom more in tune with the technophile nature of sf. The precept of Frank R. PAUL was decisive here. An artist with training as an architect, Paul was possibly Gernsback's most remarkable discovery. This prodigious talent created his own brand of future city, with its sensuously curving lines an exotic amalgam of Byzantium and the local movie palace, owing something to the Art Deco movement. The same patterns were exaggerated in paranoid style by Elliot DOLD, who developed an intense poetry of machinery. During this period, H.W. WESSO also produced spirited interpretations of mighty cities and machineries, as did Leo MOREY and Orban, but it was the purity of line of Charles SCHNEEMANand Rogers that best conveyed the aspirations of technocratic culture, where the merely human dwindles in the light of its aseptic artefacts.Few sf illustrations are memorable in their own right; they come and they go. An exception must be made for Schneeman's idealistic picture of E.E. "Doc"SMITH's hero, Kimball Kinnison, the Grey Lensman, striding along with two formidable alien allies (ASF Oct 1939). Together with Rogers's cover for Robert A. HEINLEIN's "The Roads Must Roll" (ASF Nov 1939), it represents asynthesis of that immaculate metal-clad future towards which many thought the world was rolling. Of course it was an illusion: WWII was already raging in Europe. In place of Rogers, Freas became ASF's most popular artist; he specialized in roughnecks with guns.ASF was iconoclastic, aware of its brand-image as the intellectual's sf magazine. The emphasis was on the word, which got things done, not the drawing, which was merely decorative; in consequence, much interior artwork was dull. For vigour, one turned to lesser magazines, to the crowded Herman Vestals in Startling Stories and Planet Stories, or to Rod RUTH in Fantastic Adventures, whosespirited sketches for "Queen of the Panther World" by Berkeley LIVINGSTON (July 1948) still retain their power.Of the new 1950s magazines, Gal hasalready been mentioned. Its misty interior illustrations appeared refreshingly contemporary; best-remembered exponents of this style are William Ashman, Don Sibley, Dick Francis and the alarming Kossin. Amongthe names rising to prominence in the 1960s were John SCHOENHERR, Mel Hunter (1929-) and Jack GAUGHAN. By this time, the magazines had tidiedup their typography, imitating their powerful rivals in the paperback industry; it is in paperback books that most of the traditional art is aired nowadays.With sf motifs pervading certain strata of popular MUSIC, sf and fantasy art made formidable appearances on record album sleeves. Notably, Roger DEAN's striking composites of machine, insect, animal andbone have convincing power. Dean and the remarkably fecund Patrick Woodroffe (1940-) published collections of their own work, as did KarelTHOLE, King Surrealist of sf art.The new professional magazines of the later 1970s relied heavily on old modes of illustration. GALILEO did best, with Tom Barber striving towards something fresh. But it seemed undeniable that innovations would be more likely to occur elsewhere. Innovation follows cash flow: movies, tv and record-album covers adopted, on a wide front, an idiom that virtually began in the magazines. That early work, for many reasons, can never be repeated; for aesthetic reasons, it cannot be ignored. A number of books of the 1970s deal, in whole or in part, with sf illustration: Hier, L'an 2000 (1973 France; trans as 2000 A.D.: Illustrations from the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps 1975) byJacques SADOUL; One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration (1974) by Anthony FREWIN; Science Fiction Art (1975) by Brian W. ALDISS and A Pictorial History of Science Fiction (1976) by David A. KYLE.

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2. From 1978 to 1992 This has been a period of few sf magazines: Gal died and the circulations of those that survived slipped inexorably downhill. The new UK magazine INTERZONE (begun 1982) unevenly experimented with cover art inmany styles, Ian MILLER's bizarre, STEAMPUNK machines being among the more memorable results. The balance, so far as sf illustration was concerned, became permanently tilted in this period away from magazines and towards the covers of paperback books and the dust-jackets of hardcovers, and even here (remuneration in the book business not being highly competitive) some of the more successful artists, like Frank FRAZETTA, worked only briefly in the field before moving on to other forms of commercial art. A big success on book covers of the late 1970s were the erotic fantasies of Boris VALLEJO, whose busty bimbos in bondage harked back with a kind offrozen tastelessness to the era of the pin-up girl, but after a while his work could most easily be bought in the form of calendars.Through much of the 1970s and 1980s UK sf paperback book covers were dominated by space pictures in a smooth, airbrushed style, with vast spacecraft looming - a style which most critics associated with Chris FOSS. Tim WHITE and Jim BURNS, Foss's heirs as the most successful UK sf illustrators, workedeasily in this mode, though much of the best work of both is in other styles. Anthony ROBERTS and Angus MCKIE were also among the guilty parties. Burns was the first UK artist to win a HUGO for his work. While the style lasted, it looked to the casual bookshop browser as if all UK-published sf was effectively the same book.In the USA, sf cover art wasdominated through the 1980s by the paintings of Michael WHELAN, meticulous and vivid but perhaps with a rather-too-commercial predictability. He has created what will surely be an all-time record by failing to win the Hugo for Best Professional Artist only twice in the years 1980-1991 inclusive, winning 10 Hugos in all in that category, and an 11th for Best Non-Fiction Book. Some find that the covers of one of his closer competitors, DonMAITZ (who also won a Hugo), have more movement and vigour. Many of Maitz's covers are fantastic rather than technological, and the move away from icons of technology as a means of selling sf in book form was if anything even more pronounced in the USA during the 1980s than in the UK. Sf books sometimes featured the work of almost purely fantastic artistslike ROWENA or the well achieved Art Nouveau pastiche of Thomas CANTY (although decorative styles based on woodcuts, stained glass andlate-19th-century illustration had previously been used, to very great effect, by Leo and Diane DILLON). Other notable US cover artists of the 1980s include James GURNEY, Barclay SHAW and Darrell SWEET.It issurprising that Surrealist book covers have been used comparatively seldom for sf, despite the memorable work of Richard POWERS in the USA (BALLANTINE BOOKS during the 1950s) in this supposedly more up-market andrespectable style. Others to adopt a semi-Surrealist style were Brian LEWIS in the UK, Paul LEHR in the USA and Karel THOLE in Europe, but noneof these are artists whose work is at all typical of the 1980s. The best known sf-Surrealist of our time is, like Thole, a European, and deeply influenced by the traditions of decadent graphic art that were always so much stronger in Europe than in the USA. This is H.R. GIGER, the Swiss painter whose work became justly celebrated in the USA with the film ALIEN (1979), for which he designed both monsters and spacecraft. His biomorphiccreations are both phallic and vulval in a manner that, had it appeared in comic strips in the 1950s, would have justified the hysteria of Dr Fredric Wertham (1895-1981), whose book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954)charged that coded vaginas appeared in the shading of some comics drawing. (These and similar charges led directly to the introduction of the ComicsCode in 1955.) Giger is not a cover artist, and has had only a small influence in that field.It may be that sf illustration as a separate genre is slowly dying away, with the advent of the paperback book not really compensating for the death of the magazines in providing a niche for it. Certainly, there is not much in the sf art of the late 1980s/90s to getexcited about; most of the development has been in fantasy art (and much of that, too, deals in visual stereotypes). While general standards are much higher than they were in, say, the PULP MAGAZINES, the sense of lurid freedom seems to have disappeared now that publishers carefully commission book covers which, normally, are designed to attract without giving offence.In one area there have been great advances: the COMICS, once again. Most comics art is poor, but some is very good indeed. A new development in comics, the GRAPHIC NOVEL, has showcased artists, either working in close collaboration with writers or writing their own scenarios, some of whom are exceptional; they include Enki BILAL, Brian BOLLAND, Dave GIBBONS, Dave MCKEAN and Frank MILLER. But this is a whollydifferent art from sf illustration proper, comics being themselves a storytelling medium whereas magazine illustrations and book covers have the more static function of rendering icons designed to label the publication as being sf (or fantasy) and then to sell it, not to further the story.See the Introduction for lists of comics artists and sf illustrators who receive entries in this encyclopedia.

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   See also: SEX.