December 12, 2008

Movie books and horror comics

This awesome Frank Frazetta tableau has been reprinted in the first of a series of hardback volumes re-releasing Creepy back into the world. In the same vein as EC Comics' Tales From The Crypt et al, but for a slightly older 1970s audience, Creepy was a large-format magazine full of high quality black-and-white artwork, all terror-filled tales with twists in the tail.

Volume One is out now, made up of the first five issues, with Volume Two due out soon.



The impressive highs in the career of movie producer Michael Deeley is documented in a new book. Anyone who has worked with Nicolas Roeg and Sam Peckinpah, and on films such as Blade Runner, The Deer Hunter and The Italian Job (1969) deserves a book. I hope he also talks about one of his earliest assignments, The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn - an early classic Peter Sellers short!



Good information on filming locations is hard to find. IMDB naming the countries where movies were shot doesn't give travelling film fans much to go on. I'm therefore looking forward to getting this guide, published earlier this year.



Christopher Frayling's 2005 book on production designer Ken Adam, The Art of Production Design was all about one of my favourite movie visualists, but I was disappointed that the book was very short on illustrations.

In 1999, I went to an exhibition of Adam's original artwork at The Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, and was impressed at how many classic sketches, stretching back to the 1950s, were still in existence. Sketches of sets from Night of the Demon, as well as the original art for James Bond's tricked out Aston Martin DB7, classic set designs for the hugest James Bond and Stanley Kubrick films, all deserved a coffee table book. Now there is one. If it's not in my stocking on Christmas morning, Santa's a dead man. You hear me, Santa?

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