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Reading Time: 3 minutes There is no doubt, other than Foss, Peter Elson was a powerhouse of the heyday of science fiction illustration and books with his covers always got my attention.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Unlike most books on the subject, which are either pictorial or voluminous in nature, World War II Infographics takes the interesting approach of interpreting the mountains of statistical data compiled after the war

Reading Time: 3 minutes Homer: The Iliad & The Odyssey, as presented by Cross and Packer can not be recommended enough

Reading Time: 2 minutes I have been doing a lot of visual research for my series ‘MAG-100’, I need a mental kickstart at times to get things flowing. Unlike when I was in college in the early to mid 90s though, there is now an overload of work to look at, through channels such as Instagram or Pintrest, which is fantastic. But what’s become increasingly evident, if taken at face value, is the grim abundance of artwork involving characters/machinery armed to the teeth. Growing up in the late 70’s and 80’s, I was front row to science fiction art produced by the likes of…

Reading Time: 8 minutes I was hooked instantly – hard not to be, as what it held in its pages was so far beyond what I had seen elsewhere; partly because Manga was a fully matured and accepted form of publishing in Japan.

Reading Time: 6 minutes But what’s best about these books? What would make me track them down, and pay a premium, so many years later?

Reading Time: 4 minutes I’ve been on a bit of a roll lately with various things and perhaps most intriguingly, they have all been interconnected. It started with a thought I had about the state of design in science fiction, which then rolled into a bit I wrote about the tools of the trade. And smack bang in the middle of the two, was rediscovering Maschinen Krieger, which lead to a whole bunch of other stuff. Which leads us to here, my review of a well out of publication book. In my wild quest to learn as much as I could about Kow Yokoyama,…

Reading Time: 4 minutes There is a true joy in discovering something new, so back in 2002 or so in an unlikely bookshop, I discovered something that has ended up an ongoing journey of unfolding surprises. ‘The Lost Thing’, with its almost abstract narrative and illustrations was so immediately captivating for me, I wondered if it was really meant to be a children’s book at all. From this first book I have gone on to snap up most things Australian illustrator, sculptor and author, Shaun Tan, has published and in doing so, I have been taken on an unlikely journey as Tan, a multi…

Reading Time: 7 minutes For the past few years I have been doodling away in an attempt to create a visual language for the my ‘universe’. If I have to be honest about it, it had been a dismal failure as far as projects go, so much so, I found growing the universe through words, rather than images, to be far more satisfying; and in that regard I moved forward quite nicely. Peter Elson The problem being (in a very ‘first world problem’ sort of way) that this was not what the whole thing was supposed to be about. The ‘project’ was supposed to…

Reading Time: 3 minutes I instantly recognised why his work at the time was so magnetic – it has that ageless ’something’. While I can’t put my finger on just what this something is, Huxley’s Matchbox art has it in spades.