by George Beahm
The cover was drawn by EC Comics artist Jack Kamen, showing a boy in bed at night reading a ten-cent comic titled Creepshow, with posters decorating his bedroom wall (George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, The Shining, and Carrie). A hooded, skeletal figure peers in through the boy’s window, illuminated by a full moon in the background.
Of the five stories, two stand out because of the outstanding artwork: Bernie excels in depicting monsters, and so “The Crate” is memorable, with its werewolflike creature, as is “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” which recalls the humorous flavor of Wrightson’s “Uncle Bill’s Barrel” and his work for the DC comic Swamp Thing.
34
DRAWN TO DARKNESS
BERNIE WRIGHTSON, AN ARTIST INSPIRED BY STEPHEN KING
For the privileged few who bought any edition of ‘Salem’s Lot from Centipede Press, you own one of the finest examples of specialty publishing in our field. The one-man press, based in Denver, Colorado, is run by a high-energy, enthusiastic guy named Jerad Walters, whose sense of aesthetics in terms of book design is second to none. Like an Arkham House book published when August Derleth was at the helm, a Centipede Press book is singularly distinctive. Jerad also has what I consider to be an essential quality for any man crazy enough to run a one-person small press: He has the capacity to take infinite pains; he’s detailed-oriented and sweats the small stuff.
He followed up his gorgeous edition of ‘Salem’s Lot with another Stephen King–related title, Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King, which I wrote. That tombstone-sized book is also out-of-print, and it too sported first-class production values. The 1,500-copy slipcase edition cost $395, the 300-copy tray-case edition cost $895, and the 25-copy lettered edition cost $4,995.
In his introduction to the book, film director Frank Darabont shares a telling anecdote about a phone conversation he had with Stephen King years before Jerad independently came up with the same idea. Frank’s idea: King “should put all that art together and publish it as a huge book, call it The Art of Stephen King.”
King’s response: “Jesus—you know how much art that is? Or the effort that would go into a book like that? No way, Jose! There aren’t enough hours in the day, or days in the year! It would take forever! Sober up!”
I’m glad that no one dissuaded Jerad Walters, because he was crazy enough to pursue his mad dream, for which we are all indebted: Almost all the art was shot from the originals or color-adjusted scans of the original art, instead of printed pages overlaid with type. In other words, Jerad went above and beyond, to the point where he commissioned artists to render new pieces just for this project.
Karen Haber of Locus (October 2010) sang the book’s praises:
From the first glance at the slipcover of Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King, with its lunatic demon-possessed lawman from Desperation, painted by Don Maitz, or the flip side, with its dark portrait of Randall Flagg, arch villain of The Stand, as rendered by the late Don Brautigam, you know you are in for a wild ride. What else would you expect from a giant volume filled with art inspired by the master of darkness? The only thing missing is a sound chip implanted in the cover to provide a faint scream or anguished groan as the book is opened.
With this beautiful volume, and its predecessor, A Lovecraft Retrospective (2008), Centipede Press has set the bar even higher for fine art book publishing—and for weight training on the part of any readers who hope to read this thirteen-pound book. Centipede’s second mammoth tribute volume measures eleven by fifteen inches, with 448 pages and over five hundred illustrations, including thirty double-page foldouts. This definitive collection of art spans King’s 35-plus-year career, with newly commissioned artwork and reprinted art.
The lineup reads like a Who’s Who of dark fantasy, science fiction, and horror artists, represented by a wide variety of media including collages, scratchboard, oils, acrylics, watercolors, graphite pencil, photographs, and digital art.… As if the artwork and essays weren’t enough, the sheer quality of the physical materials used to create the book inspires admiration: the heavy matte varnished paper, the sewn-in binding and ribbon bookmarks, and custom-fitted illustrated slipcases.
Like Harlan Ellison, who is an ardent collector of artwork, especially pieces illustrating his book covers and interiors, Stephen King is also a collector and has several fine pieces in his collection, including a Phil Hale piece from the limited edition of The Talisman, a Jeffrey Jones painting from the same edition, and a gorgeous Michael Whelan painting from the seventh book in the Dark Tower series, titled The Dark Tower. Moreover, King—like most writers—is very concerned about cover art, for the simple reason that even though you can’t judge a book by its cover, it’s what the potential customer sees before he opens the book for a sample reading.
The Centipede Press edition of Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King.
As booksellers will tell you, when a potential customer is browsing a book in a retail store, he’s halfway to a sale when it’s picked up: the cover is not mere decoration but an essential sales tool. It explains why publishers go out and hire the best cover artists—Michael Whelan, Drew Struzan, Bernie Wrightson, and others—because their work helps draw you into the book.
Knowing Darkness remains a testament to the many artists who have illustrated King’s work, and it’d be impossible to do them all justice in this book, so I’d like to concentrate on Bernie Wrightson, who has illustrated the most diverse selection of King books: Creepshow, Cycle of the Werewolf, From a Buick 8, The Stand, The Dark Tower: The Wolves of the Calla, and art for TV Guide’s cover story on The Shining.
BERNIE WRIGHTSON
2009
When I was working on Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King, I especially enjoyed interviewing as many artists as possible. Some of them I had not known, but I’m glad to say I’ve known Bernie since the seventies when he burst on the comic book scene and made everyone sit up and pay attention. One look at his work—the draftsmanship, the humor, the sheer inventiveness of his graphic storytelling skills—was enough to show that he was destined for great things: Early on, he showed considerable promise, and in the years that followed, Bernie delivered.
His masterpiece is surely his series of pen-and-ink illustrations for Frankenstein, which has seen print by three publishers (so far). The best, in my opinion, is from Dark Horse Books (October 2008), which unfortunately is out of print. Fortunately, it is available on the secondary market, and it is well worth your time to track down a copy to add to your collection.
If Franklin Booth, another great pen-and-ink artist, had seen Bernie’s work on Mary Shelley’s haunting novel, he’d whistle in admiration. Yeah, Bernie’s work on Frankenstein is that good.
Switching gears here: The best interviews are conducted in person at a creator’s studio, because that’s where he is most comfortable; he’s in his element, relaxed, and won’t be interrupted as he would in a more public environment, like a convention. Fortunately, I was able to conduct an interview for Knowing Darkness with Bernie at his studio. I’m was with veteran Disney artist Tim Kirk in Bernie’s studio, a small but cozy apartment crammed with a lifetime of collecting curiosities both mundane and macabre: skeletal models of dinosaurs; a life-sized human figure showing musculature and bones; figurines of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Bride of Frankenstein, and the creature from the Black Lagoon; angelic figurines; a shelf crammed with unabridged audiobooks of fiction by Stephen King and J. K. Rowling; shelves crammed with books on art, anatomy, history, and novels; and, in every nook and cranny, paintbrushes sprouting from tin cans and glass jars.
Bernie’s studio was exactly as I had imagined it: a cross between a young boy’s toy shop and a biological-specimen house. Clearly, buried within the adult are the sensibilities of a little boy who delights in artifacts of innocence and experience. His world is suffused with popular culture, fueling his wondrously macabre imagination. (One can say the same about Stephen King, who is o
ne year older than Bernie.)
Growing up in the fifties, in the shadow of the atomic bomb, against the backdrop of the Cold War, both Bernie and Stephen lived at a time when the United States enjoyed a postwar boom, making it the preeminent world power militarily and economically. The two both grew up in blue-collar households where money was tight. They both haunted movie theaters, watching endless B movies showing mutated insects, people, and monsters—all accidental victims of radiation poisoning. The two devoured pop fiction in well-thumbed paperback books and comic books, especially Bill Gaines’s lurid line of comics: science fiction, suspense, and horror rendered in exquisite detail and four-color by Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, and others.
“We didn’t have books in the house,” Bernie recalled, “but we had comics. My mom read romance comics, my dad read war comics, and I got Superman and Donald Duck.”
But, in a scene reminiscent of Creepshow, Bernie’s mom threw out his collection of horror comics because she perceived them as being trash, which is where they ended up, to his dismay.
Years later, as adults, both Bernie and Stephen tapped into the latent power of the outsider, a staple in pop culture: Wrightson’s Swamp Thing, who reared up out of the wetland, and King’s young adults Carietta “Carrie” White (Carrie), Arnie Cunningham (Christine), and Charlene “Charlie” McGee (Firestarter).
Fueled by endless cups of black coffee, chain-smoking cigarettes, and glazed doughnuts, Bernie sat back to relax behind his drawing table. He took a long drag on his cigarette, exhaled slowly as smoke eddied and filled the room, and got down to the business at hand: talking nonstop for the next four hours.
A longtime collector of his work, I have his retrospective collection, A Look Back, and his classic Frankenstein on my shelf, and I also have many of his art prints. I’d met him through my associations with Vaughn Bode and Jeffrey Jones, two of the finest artists to emerge out of the comics field. (Vaughn passed away in 1975, at age thirty-three, and Jeff in 2011.)
Those were heady days for art collectors. I was at a Phil Seuling Comicon in 1971, talking to Russ Cochran, who had just begun representing Frank Frazetta. Russ had one of Frazetta’s paintings for $700. We witnessed one fan complain about the price, saying that no one would ever pay that much money for a painting by him. Flash forward to 2010: a Frazetta painting of Conan the Barbarian sells for $1.5 million.
Who would have guessed that comic books would be four-color treasures the likes of which Smaug would have hoarded? That original art from comics and paperback book covers would be worth a king’s ransom? Our parents never knew—they considered it all junk—but we knew better.
What follows are observations from Bernie from my interviews with him over the years, some with explanatory texts by me on some of Bernie’s King-related projects.
STEPHEN KING’S CREEPSHOW
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, TRADE EDITION, 1982
“King was in Pittsburgh. I don’t know how much time he spent there, but he was filming his segment ‘The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrill,’ in which he was cast as a country bumpkin. I got a call one night. My wife gets the phone, hands it to me, and tells me it’s Stephen King. Yeah, right. I’m thinking it’s a prank from one of my friends, like Bruce Jones.”
“‘Is this Bernie? This is Steve King.’”
“Wow, I thought. It’s really him.”
“‘I’m in Pittsburgh, and I’m working on a movie with George Romero. You know George Romero, right?’”
“Sure,” I said. “Night of the Living Dead.”
“‘We’re working on a movie. It’s an anthology movie with several stories from a horror comic. We are working with [EC artist] Jack Kamen, who is also working on the movie. We assumed Jack was doing the comic book version, but when we asked him about it, he said he didn’t know what we were talking about.’
“Stephen King said, ‘Is there any possibility that you could do the comic book?’ And at the time, there was something else I had to put aside to take it on. They wanted the whole thing done in two months, but it took me four months to do it.
“I probably put the most work into ‘The Crate’ and ‘Jordy Verrill.’ Those were my two favorite segments from the movie. ‘The Crate’ because it’s a movie within a movie. And ‘Jordy Verrill’ because it was played for laughs.”
The graphic novel was published in July 1982. The cover was by Jack Kamen, but the interiors were by Bernie. The contents included “Father’s Day,” “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” “The Crate,” “Something to Tide You Over,” and “They’re Creeping up on You.” A homage to the EC Comics line, this movie tie-in edition ran sixty-four pages.
CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF
The Land of Enchantment, limited and trade edition, 1983; Signet, trade edition, 1985
[The Land of Enchantment publisher] “Chris Zavisa put that whole thing together. It was his idea for a long time to do a project with Stephen King, with me as the illustrator. Chris wanted to do new material, a small project that he could handle as a specialty publisher. We were talking about it and Chris came up with the idea of doing a calendar. It’d almost have to be a werewolf story because the only thing all the months have in common is a full moon.
“What I wanted to do would tie in with the dates of the calendar. Whatever year this was coming out we’d time it so that the events were happening on the same day as the calendar with the full moons. After we got this all worked out, Chris approached King, who seemed excited by the whole idea. King started working on it as a calendar project. Each story was to be several paragraphs, a block of copy under the illustration, and under this, the calendar itself. As he was writing, King said the story began to grow on him, and he couldn’t contain it to just a few paragraphs per month. Finally, it was becoming obvious that it was not going to be a calendar.
“King sent me the finished book version and I just did the illustrations.”
THE STAND: THE COMPLETE AND UNCUT EDITION
Doubleday, limited and trade edition, 1990
Bernie was commissioned by Stephen King to illustrate the book and did so with twelve pen-and-ink pieces that add a visual cachet to the expanded edition; the original edition, published in 1978, lacked illustrations. With a mixture of pieces rendered in a film noir style and a sweeping landscape recalling his work in The Cycle of the Werewolf, the illustrations are among Bernie’s best work.
The artwork was subsequently published as a separate portfolio of art from Glimmer Graphics (1,200 sets, out of print). Nakatomi (nakatomiinc.com), which publishes Wrightson’s prints, published ten prints in a portfolio: 40 sets ($300) in a regular edition, and 15 sets ($500) in the artist edition, in June 2015.
“I did twelve pen-and-ink interior illustrations. The deal was done with Stephen, who commissioned and paid for them, and not with the publisher.
I worked from both the original and revised versions of the book.
There are two or three drawings that, if you haven’t read the excised stuff, you wouldn’t know what it’s from. In the revised version, there’s material involving the Trashcan Man that is really going to change your mind about how you are going to feel about him. And bits and pieces, here and there, that clarify things or add another dimension to it. And some material involving a new character that is just some of the creepiest stuff you’ll ever read.
FROM A BUICK 8
Cemetery Dance, limited and trade edition, 2002
The limited edition is illustrated with color illustrations that draw on Bernie’s strengths as an illustrator. Because monsters are his strong suit, his visual interpretation of the alien creature from another world strikes all the right notes; there’s three plates of an alien-looking creature who opens a portal in his attempt to transport Ned Wilcox into its world.
The juxtaposition of the real and the unreal—the setting of a state police barracks in western Pennsylvania—is stark: one illustration shows the horrified look of state troopers as they stand outside a garage and stare
with incredulity through the garage windows to see lightning crackle inside housing what appears to be—but is clearly not—a Buick Roadmaster.
THE DARK TOWER: THE WOLVES OF CALLA
Donald M. Grant, Publisher, limited edition, 2003
It’s September 21, 1988—Stephen King’s fifty-first birthday—and he’s on the set of The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont, with Bernie Wrightson present. As Bernie recalled, “I got to see King in the electric chair and writhe around and make faces.”
At that informal gathering, King told Bernie, “Oh, by the way, I was wondering if you’d be interested in illustrating the next Dark Tower book.” Bernie immediately agreed, though it had been a while since he had read them and would need to reread them before tackling the art.
Time, though, was not a problem. Bernie told me, “I got jury duty right around that time and I had to be downtown every day for over two weeks. In fact, I had to be on call at the courthouse for almost three weeks because of jury selection for two murder trials. I had nothing to do all day but read the Dark Tower books. It was great. I read them one after the other, and then read the manuscript of The Wolves of the Calla.” He added, “When I’m illustrating a book, I’ll read the whole thing and bookmark the scenes that immediately stand out; then I go back and reread those passages. I considered their spacing throughout the book, because I don’t want the illustrations too close to one another or to have too long a stretch without one. With Steve’s writing, though, there’s a picture on almost every page, so it was very easy to pick out the standout moments.”
Bernie recalled, “During that time, Steve sent me a letter, saying he was glad I was on board. He told me: ‘If you don’t mind, I have a list of suggestions for scenes. I’m not art directing, by any means, but these are scenes that I would like to see illustrated. If you agree, that’s fine; and if not, just illustrate the scenes you want.’ As it turned out, King’s list of twelve scenes were exactly the ones I picked. I wrote back to tell him he had picked the best scenes—the same ones I had picked; they were also spaced exactly right throughout the body of the book.”
