In the tradition of the Photorealism and Hyperrealism movements that had evolved as offshoots of Pop Art, the paintings of musician, songwriter, and figurative painter Paul Roberts exist in the liminal space between perceived glamor and kitsch, taking their cues from the archetypes of genre fiction and the heightened realities of cinema and photography…
As part of this year’s holiday “festivities,” my fellow US-based Mutants have mockingly given me a couple of the toy pages from a 1979 American catalog to look at in the hope of stimulating some idiosyncratic British take on the very different world of US toys, and possibly provoking a bit of retrospective seasonal gift envy. I can almost hear them now, chortling away mirthlessly in their La-Z-Boy recliners in their respective dens, or wherever the fuck it is that North Americans go to chortle. But they won’t break me; I’m made of sterner stuff…
Thanks to the record covers he drew for Rudimentary Peni, the band for which he was vocalist and guitarist, artist Nick Blinko’s initial audience was mainly confined to the members of the thriving British anarcho-punk scene of the early 1980s. Despite apparently operating in the same aggressive idiom as their peers, however, it was immediately clear that the Peni were unique…
A collision of imperial phase-Young Artists—the London-based illustration agency whose imagery would dominate and define British science fiction and fantasy art throughout the 1970s and ’80s—and an attention to graphic design detail that bordered on the unhinged, Tour of the Universe was a bold attempt to create an immersive world of science fiction art and prose that still looks as wildly ambitious today…
Positing a fantasy world where Renaissance and Enlightenment values co-existed with the joys and preoccupations of the coming technological age, the Rondo Veneziano orchestra was the brainchild of Italian record label owner Freddy Naggiar, who noticed the lack of Italian instrumental music on the international scene and charged orchestra director and arranger/composer Gian Piero Reverberi to come up with someone or something to fill the gap…
The itinerant fun fairs that stalked the British Isles, descending at regular intervals upon some desolate local field like shoddy Fortean dream cities, were once a major part of the informal national calendar. As a child growing up in the hinterland of the world’s most beautiful town—the gleaming futurist metropolis known as Doncaster, South Yorkshire—I was lucky enough to live near a fuck-off massive one…
Ionicus—the pen name of prolific British illustrator Joshua Charles Armitage—is probably best known for his cover illustrations for Penguin Books’ P. G. Wodehouse reissues and magazine The Dalesman, as well as the many cartoons he contributed to Punch magazine. But it is his work for London publishing house William Kimber & Co that may best represent his legacy…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
Before we start on this episode’s Progs, let’s talk about, in my mind, the definitive Dredd illustrator—inarguably a definitive comics illustrator—Carlos Ezquerra, who passed away this week at the age of 70…
Though sometimes dismissed as a disappointing compromise between the two phases of Chrome’s musical output—the delirious, expressionist SF punk cut-ups of Alien Soundtracks (1977) and Half Machine Lip Moves (1979) and the more “traditional” LPs that followed, like Blood on the Moon (1981) and 3rd From the Sun (1982)—Chrome’s fourth LP, 1980’s Red Exposure, could scarcely sound more uncompromising…
Devoted to investigating the paranormal and the supernatural, the debut issue of Mexican weekly magazine Duda—“doubt” or “question”—was released in March 1971. It would prove to be a popular and influential publication, and a surprisingly long-lived success for its Mexico City publisher Editorial Posada…
We Are the Mutants 