Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [5]
Jim lived in a boarding house occupied entirely by New Worlds contributors around the corner from Ladbroke Grove in Portland Road. He often produced the illustrations as Disch, Sladek, Bayley, Merril or one of the others wrote the story! He also designed sets for Hawkwind stage shows and painted individual T-shirts for band members. He produced strips and illustrations for Frendz and other underground press publications, for SF and fantasy magazines such as Vision of Tomorrow and Vortex.
I was commissioned in the late 1960s by The Times of India to write a serial which the editor hoped would alert Indians to their need to embrace science and technology, to be published in The Illustrated Weekly of India. Jim not only illustrated the story extensively but also took over the writing for the second half when overwork caused my temporary exhaustion. When I was asked to produce a script for E. R. Burroughs’s novel The Land That Time Forgot, Jim became my collaborator, breaking down the scenes as he had done for an earlier planned graphic version. We worked together easily and rapidly. By the 1970s Jim also became artist in residence for Savoy Books (www.savoy.abel.co.uk), under the aegis of David Britton and Michael Butterworth. Not only did he produce the first graphic novel of Stormbringer, he did a brilliant version of my Hawkmoon books as The Jewel in the Skull and The Crystal and the Amulet, while illustrating the book version of Sojan, The Golden Barge and others.
By 1967 New Worlds had become a very different kind of publication from the SF magazine I had taken over. We were the first English-language magazine to feature, for instance, the work of M. C. Escher. We had an ongoing relationship with some of the leading fine artists and poets of the day, some of whom became regular visitors to my apartment in Ladbroke Grove. One of these was Eduardo Paolozzi, whose sculptures and graphics are in most leading museums of modern art around the world, and who had become our Aeronautics Adviser. I remember I had one of Jim’s first Elric drawings framed on the wall of my office when Eduardo spotted it and began to enthuse about its line, demanding, as was his way, that I let him have it. Of course, I refused and he then offered to buy it. As I recall I arranged for him to buy something else of Jim’s. Today I have work by both men hanging on my walls. Now that Eduardo is dead, I can probably admit that I’m not sure Jim had the same enthusiasm as I did for Diana as an Engine or the designs adorning Tottenham Court Road tube station. Jim’s heroes were Hal Foster, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, Burne Hogarth and the great classic American adventure strip artists. For all that, I continued to run work by fine artists side by side with illustrations by Jim, Mal Dean and some of the outstanding illustrators of the period in the magazine.
Ironically, as well as introducing me to the work of Mervyn Peake, Jim had also made me an enthusiast for many great artists, especially the Pre-Raphaelites and visionaries such as “Mad” John Martin, who painted vast biblical scenes, and Richard Dadd. It’s fair to say he had little taste for modernism, but he was no philistine. Indeed, the whole New Worlds movement had been to some degree a reaction against what Ballard, Bayley and myself had seen as a descent of modern fiction into a corrupt and generic version of the golden age of modernism as exemplified by Joyce and Eliot, just as the pop artists had rejected abstraction. We had all looked for a revivification of the arts in such popular forms as science fiction and the livelier forms of Victorian expression, in the hope that we could develop a new, viable kind of art which, while not rejecting the best modernism, connected to the sensibilities of a broad audience, and I think we were, at least to a degree, successful. That attempt continues and has become increasingly successful. Jim introduced me not only to fantasts and adventure story writers but to urban noir writers like Chandler and Hammett, humorists like Damon