May 01
Click for full imageTat Wood Comments: I just popped back to France and found some more ripe examples of 70s French cover-art. This has all the worst features of inept collage but was painstakingly painted by a professional artist.
Published 1978
You might remember this from here.
(Average: 8.10 out of 10)
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(9.25 out of 10)
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May 1st, 2017 at 12:50 pm
I expect the cover to start singing the praises of science fiction double features any moment.
May 1st, 2017 at 1:23 pm
With the Blue Man Group finally destroyed, the giant lizards can rule the earth unopposed!
May 1st, 2017 at 1:26 pm
You can’t make a good cover without breaking a few devil’s dumplings.
May 1st, 2017 at 1:38 pm
Bosch meets de Chirico meets the Giant Gila Monster!
May 1st, 2017 at 1:49 pm
Surrealism is European intellectual sophistication.
May 1st, 2017 at 2:02 pm
Pas des moutons pour les francaise! 🙂
May 1st, 2017 at 3:40 pm
@RayP: sophistication or sophistry?
May 1st, 2017 at 3:53 pm
@DSWBigT—hey, those Europeans are heavy philosophical cats (and I do mean cats, ou les chats).
May 1st, 2017 at 3:55 pm
France 1978: Yves Tanguy was starting to run out of ideas, not surprisingly since by then he’d been dead for 23 years – even chain-smoking Gauloises can’t preserve a zombie that long. (Only the Walking Dead universe can do that.)
May 1st, 2017 at 4:27 pm
Just waiting for the big foot to descend…
May 1st, 2017 at 4:42 pm
Someone’s left a couple headless nude statues in the desert under a giant half-egg, and they’re being harassed by the Dairy Queen mascot (the flying mouth). The random, tilted architectural folly and the giant iguana do nothing for the confusion.
May 2nd, 2017 at 1:27 am
It is… ‘ow you say… zee LSD.
Apparently, if vous echange, you lose body parts and your head catches on fire.
The book is seemingly a wacky comedy of errors, so I suspect this is another case of “throw something weird on the cover so people know it’s SF, as opposed to an illustration.
Although even if this was an illustration, it’s not for this book. And I don’t want to read the book it’s for.
May 2nd, 2017 at 2:26 am
Space Sheep must be on bank holiday.
May 2nd, 2017 at 2:28 pm
We’ve seen this book before. It’s English title was Mindswap, and had an equally useless cover.
http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/?p=5193
May 2nd, 2017 at 10:17 pm
Professional Musing:
I wonder if SF books *in general* would sell better to mainstream audiences if they all had these “Surrealist” covers instead of the usual skiffy stuff…
May 3rd, 2017 at 12:00 am
@ARY: Doubt it. Skiffy stuff is at least familiar to them through movies and TV. Surrealism scares the punters.
May 3rd, 2017 at 8:01 am
Another thing I noticed about French and European skiffy book releases: They don’t use blurbs much.
French blurb:
They ventured to the edge of the known cosmos — but found only existential ennui, a broken croissant and a discarded cigarette…
May 3rd, 2017 at 5:52 pm
@A.R.Yngve: (Parisian edition) They ventured to the edge of the known cosmos – but found only les Banlieues.
May 3rd, 2017 at 8:16 pm
I doff my cap to Tat Wood for a blurb magnifique that has a certain je ne sais quois.
August 9th, 2017 at 2:12 pm
@DSWBT (#1) – Take Samuel Beckett and Billie Whitelaw’s lips, add a liberal dose of ergot, and stir violently while listening to ‘Not I’. Voila! You have this book cover!