Mr. Van Gelder,
One of the aspects I like about Analog (actually one of the qualities which sets them apart in the current market), and other classics like Galaxy and Worlds of If is the accompaning art. Now historically FSF has never been strong in this area. Is there ever a possibility that art could take a more active role beyond the cover?
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Art in SFS
(16 posts)-
Posted 2 weeks ago #
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No, but you can draw anything you like in the margins.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
I prefer no artwork to the kind of crude boring repetitve vapid anti-life derivative illustrations that appear in Analog.
In fact the artwork in F & SF may be minimal but it does at least it shows some element of taste and the cartoons are funny. The covers especially are usually excellent.
David
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
I always liked the art that appeared in AMAZING and FANTASTIC under Ted White, a lot of it single-column (half page width) format. But I can't imagine F&SF following suit & remaining true to itself.
Tangent: personally, with my bad/deterioriating eyesight, I wish F&SF would use a 2-column typographic format for all its pages - much, much easier to read. But that too would breach tradition.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
Personally I find the illustrations in all the sci fi magazines that I have seen to be generally of poor quality comapared to the sort that one would find for example in comparable literary magazines (Harper's, The Walrus) or art magazines (Art in America, Juxtapose). More generally the science fiction/fantasy communities don't seem to have a flare for aesthetics or style (look at any issue of Locus and see how shabbily dressed everyone is). Of course this is predictable since the science orientated and fantasy orientated communities mostly haven't overlapped with avante-garde artistic communities: which is a shame of course.
That said, when it comes to cover art F&SF is far better than the others and I'd prefer no art to bad art cluttering up its pages.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
But why is SF and Fantasy art being peddled on the net? And why are there no takers for the really good art?
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
Are you asking me that John? I'd venture to guess that maybe some people are just attached to the kitchy stuff because they've grown up with it: it seems that scifi/fantasy art (sff) is dominated by a certain nostalgia. In fact my relatively short exposure to the sff scene has already led me to formulate the hypothesis that the people who inhabit it are surprisingly anachronistic (considering the progressive social/political/technological ideas of the scifi genre at least). More than that though I think that its just ignorance, the same way that people of other subcultures are ignorant of sff so are the latter generally ignorant of the former: and this ignorance leads to an inability to appreciate the other. If you polled a bunch of people at a con how many of them would even know the difference between Manet and Monet for instance, let alone how many would be keeping up with events in the contemporary art scene?
Sff art appears to me still trapped in the confines of the heroic escapist content of the golden age from which it gestated, with some exceptions (the cover art of Ray Bradbury or William Gibson's books for example generally being good, albeit not spectacular). And until a significant group of writers take up an appreciation for aesthetics I expect that it will continue to be that way.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
Interior art does nothing for me. I read because of the images my mind conjures up (among other reasons), and I do not need artwork to illustrate the story. I do agree that FSF's cover art is superior to the other surviving digests.
z, the two column page is not unprecedented in FSF. The early eighties used that format.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
I have to chime in on this one; I am an illustrator, and I feel compelled to comment...
Why is the art of poor quality in magazines like Analog? My guess would be money. It didn't used to be that way, though. I was drawn to the digests in the early 70s because of the artwork -- people like Vincent DiFate, Kelly Freas, Stephen Fabian, Alex Schomburg, even still the occasional Virgil Finlay were all represented in Analog, Galaxy, Fantastic, Asimov's, Thrilling, etc.
It seems in the late 80s and 90s the illustrations in Asimov's and Analog started getting kitschy and what we called "nephew-art"... and this is when budgets started getting tight due to paper costs and postage.
I never worked for the digests, but I did lots of illustrations for the Dungeons and Dragons magazines and competing books in the late 80s, and I had to quit around 1995 when they kept cutting the fees for art... digital games and card art were taking their toll on the books.
Of course I would love to see illustrations in the F&SF, but unless there was a new commitment to quality illustration, at a decent size (Analog used to feature many beautiful 2-page illustrations like Vince Difate's stunning scratchboard work), and not to commission the cheapest bidder or student artist cutting his teeth on these assignments, I'd rather save the space for the quality stories I enjoy each issue.
And you are right, GusG: an illustration can do an injustice to a story - I think of how eerie I pictured Halloweentown's cliff houses and swamps and river... it would be very challenging to capture that in pen and ink!
As far as art online, I think that's there because the web needs to stay visual and compete with print; I don't see a lot of quality there, either.
Concerning the 2-column question: It would read faster if it was 2-columns; all digests were 2 columns in the 50s-80s. I find I lose my place from the end of the line to the next one when I am tired and can't find my bifocals!
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
Indeed, Vincent DiFate's work was often quite striking; I was thinking of him when I mentioned Ted White's AMAZING/FANTASTIC. Vaughan Bodé did some good work in those venues in the '70s as well.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
Maybe you should read comic books for that sort of thing, try Heavy Metal. In fact, if you've got some scratch and you want to buy a full collection of HM from the first French issues of 1974 until the year 2000 of the American edition, hit me up at badfish07@yahoo.com
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
Science Fiction Weekly online at SciFi dot com was presenting magnificent sf art each week---where were they getting it and wasn't it being wasted in an online magazine? Surely they weren't paying much for it but they were obtaining it. The only question is whether they were getting full rights to this art, which is improbable in a here-today, gone-tomorrow online magazine. I've seen a lot of wasted sf art online that is of high quality and very usable by magazines. But is this art displayed from use elsewhere, or what? What SF Weekly had didn't seem to me to be art that was used elsewhere.
Interior art may be another matter, but cover art is locatable.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
I think one of the key differences in SF and F (pro) magazine cover art today -- and it has been this way for umpty years -- is that with very rare exception the covers are "static," as opposed to "dynamic." By that I mean that today we see scenes of alien landscapes galore, both Sf and F landscapes, where nothing is happening. Or we see a spaceship sitting on an alien world--again with nothing happening. Or sometimes we see a representational cover, with several images in juxtaposition, but no real action, implied or otherwise. That said, I must say the covers for this year's worth of Analog and Asimov's -do- show characters in action, or be threatened, in one form or other, while if you look at this year's crop of F&SF covers--while many of them are strikingly beautiful--scarce few of them show any -dynamic- scenes. More often than not, when a person, or fairy, or some alien-type does appear, they are thoughtful, or pensive, or otherwise depicted in a lowkey manner.
For context, if you go to some of the links below, you'll see that throughout the history of Analog, Asimov's and F&SF, a marked *overall* contrast in the way cover art philosophies have changed over the decades.
The observation I'm pointing up has nothing to do with the quality of any of the art shown, but only that there were many more "dynamic" covers in the past than there are today.
This is a great link here: http://www.philsp.com/magazines.html
If you click on "Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird magazines" and scroll down to, say, Astounding (or any old magazine you choose in the SF/F field), and look at some of the covers from the 1930s through today, I think you'll see the usage of a "dynamic" cover and a "static" cover has shifted gradually more toward the static cover -as a whole- over the years. I've not done any statistical analysis, of course; this is just an impression I've been getting from going through a lot of old pulp covers and then looking at what's been on the covers of magazines for the past ten, fifteen, or more years.
There's more outright action, or deadly menace, or implied dread or horror in a lot of the old stuff, where we seem to be a tad more sedate, less-menacing, and less action-oriented with today's stuff. Today's covers may be more beautiful to look at, but do they really *excite* a potential buyer to pick them up and buy them at a bookstore. Can today's covers still excite with a dynamic cover without being necessarily as pulpish as those of days gone by?
Here's some more quick shots of old covers just for fun.
http://www.philsp.com/mags/analog.html
http://www.philsp.com/mags/weirdtales.html
And some single covers:
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/w/weird_tales_192309.jpg
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/a/astounding_stories_193312.jpg
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/a/astounding_science_fiction_195802.jpg
--Dave
Posted 1 week ago # -
I think that F&SF has the best cover art of the big three American SF digest magazines. And it was so during last sixty years.
I especially like old Salter covers. They made distinction from any other SF or fantasy magazines of the era.I don't like interior illustrations in the magazines (Asimov's dropped them years ago, probably because of the money shortage), because they are mostly kitschy.
For me the best covers at the moment are Interzone's. Especially 5-6 last issues with the art of Polish artist Adam Tredowski. And Interzone is the only SF magazine with good interior illustrations (but the concept of the magazine is different, being glossy A4 magazine and all that).
Posted 1 week ago # -
George Salter was noted for designing F&SF's original logo, for his many dustjackets starting in the 1930s, and for much other artwork and design work over the years, not just artwork, but I believe in architecture as well.
F&SF never had interior artwork, but it did have little b&w design elements at the end of some of the stories, most by Ed Emshwiller. These appeared primarily in the 1950s.
Its covers were always memorable. I reprinted several on the cover of my SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE in the 1990s; blown up, they're even more impressive.
Posted 2 days ago # -
Actually, F&SF ran occasional story illos (by Solvioff, Freas, Kirberger, et al) for a brief stretch in the mid-fifties.
Posted 2 days ago #
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