Posted in: Comics | Tagged: kickstarter, rian hughes

Rian Hughes Curates Science Fiction Classic Cover Collection

Published Sat, 29 Jan 2022 09:58:09 -0600

Rian Hughes is a comic book writer and artist, as well as a graphic designer/illustrator and typographer with all three careers rarely crossing. He has distinct and separate reputations and fanbases in all three fields. His recent books include Custom Lettering of the '20s and '30s, Soho Dives, Soho Divas, and XX: A Novel, Graphic. His latest book, Rayguns and Rocketships: Vintage Science Fiction Book Cover Art being funded on Kickstarter, is a massive hardcover collection and a curation of classic science fiction book and magazine covers as published in Britain, in a collection designed by himself. This kind of thing is in Rian Hughes' blood, in comics he is best known for drawing the Dan Dare series Dare written by Grant Morrison, and often when we have met in the pub, he has the latest collections of Amazing Stories picked up from second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road. I'm seeing him next week and I'm already intrigued as to what he'll be bringing.

Rayguns and rockets! Spacesuited heroes caught in the tentacles of evil insectoid aliens! Who could resist such wonders? Science-fiction paperbacks exploded over the 1940s and '50s literary landscape with the force of an alien gamma bomb. Titles such as Rodent Mutation, The Human Bat vs The Robot Gangster, Dawn of the Mutants and Mushroom Men from Mars appeared from fly-by-night publishers making the most of the end of post-war paper rationing. They were brash and seductive – for around a shilling the future was yours.

The stories were often conceived around a pre-commissioned cover and a title suggested by the publisher, and the writers were paid by the word, and sometimes not paid at all. Titles were knocked out at a key-pounding pace, sometimes over a weekend, by authors now lost to literary history (plus a few professionals who could spot an opportunity) who were forced to write under pseudonyms like Ray Cosmic, Steve Future, Vector Magroon, or Vargo Statten.

Despite the tight deadlines and poor pay, the books' cover artists still managed to produce works of multi-hued, brain-bending brilliance, and collected here is an overview of their output during an unparalleled period of brash optimism and experimentation in British publishing. Includes scans taken from rare original art!

Stretch goals from Rian Hughes already unlocked include, a two-piece double-sided bookmark set for free to everyone, a ribbon bookmarked, foil blocking on the front board under the dust jacket and are currently going for a £20,000 stretch goal to "emboss the book's title on the front and spine of the dust jacket. And as an added bonus to those who ordered one, we will emboss the side of the slipcase as well."