Review: 'It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s'

Poster art made the big leap from the purely commercial to the voguishly decorative in the mid-sixties when hippies started decorating their groovy pads with brain-blistering images originally intended to attract flocks to Dylan concerts or other assorted happenings. During this period, infamous counterculture magazine OZ gave birth to a poster business with the express intent of enticing flower children to wallpaper their dorms with affordable images from the likes of Martin Sharp, Roger Dean, and Heinz Edelman, in essence transforming graphic art into something more personal. Big O Posters hawked its wares from 1967 into the punk era, when decidedly un-flowery artists such as H.R. Giger got in on the fun.

It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s tells the story of the company, profiles nineteen of its most significant artists, and most importantly by a great distance, presents many of its posters and other artworks by the profiled artists in full color and at large scales. The art towers above all else both because it is outrageously striking by design and because much of the text is not that interesting. Roger Dean may have produced some truly iconic fantasy images, but he’s kind of a dull dude. The same is true of most of the graphic artists who often tell their own stories via dry interviews. There are a few exceptions when too much acid (David Vaughan), awful wartime experiences (Virgil Finley), or proximity to the infinitely more exciting pop world (Edelman, who designed Yellow Submarine seemingly against his will, and Sharp, who co-wrote “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and created some Cream album covers) intervene. Witchy Vali Myers is the rare artist in this book who makes for interesting text on personality alone, and not just because she’s the only woman who cracked its all-too-typical Boys Club.

But no one is going to pick up It Must Be Art! for its words. While some of the artwork is indescribably ugly (Brad Johannsen’s “Parson’s Crazy Eyes”) or tacky (pretty much everything by Robert Venosa), there’s also a lot of cool stuff in a wide variety of styles. The best of it captures psychedelia at its most garish without losing focus: Sharp’s intricate graphic designs, Dean’s prog dreamscapes, Ivan Ripley’s nursery décor, Rudolph Hausner’s bold and grim surrealism, Graham Percy’s tactile cuteness, Virgil Finlay’s pointillistic intricacies, Wayne Anderson’s mellow, gnomish fairy tales. There are also neat spreads devoted to Yellow Submarine and Giger’s Alien.

Review: ‘Alien Vault: The Definitive Making of the Film’

Like the film it chronicles, Alien Vault is initially striking because of its elegant design. This hardcover volume comes housed in a glossy protective case. Slip out the book and scan pages and pages of full-color on-set photos, film stills, and production and concept designs by H.R. Giger, Ron Cobb, Heavy Metal artist Moebius, and director Ridley Scott. Scattered throughout those pages are vellum envelopes containing pull-out storyboards, paintings, poster art, and blueprints for the Nostromo. Why couldn’t these images just sit on the pages with the rest of the arresting pictures? Same reason the Alien has to have an external ribcage and a phallic cranium: pure design.

With such adoring attention to aesthetics, Alien Vault could have easily been a style-over-substance specimen. As is the case with Alien, the content runs deeper than its striking surface. Empire-magazine editor Ian Nathan makes his love for Ridley Scott’s film felt early in his book, which holds true to its subheading: The Definitive Making of the Film. Nathan takes the reader from his own boyhood fascination with that decidedly adult alternative to Star Wars, back to its inception in the mind of Dan O’Bannon, through its production, and on to its aftermath. His text abounds in quotes from the numerous artists who helped birth Alien, particularly Scott, Giger, and Sigourney Weaver. We learn the extent of Joseph’s Conrad’s influence on the film and the depth producers Walter Hill and David Giler brought to O’Bannon’s original idea (which irritated the writer to no end). We learn about the alien life cycle and how The Who’s Roger Daltrey contributed to the look of the film.

Voyageur Press sometimes allows style to beat substance. Alien Vault: The Definitive Making of the Film is a triumph of text and design that suggests the publisher is getting the balance right. Hopefully, Nathan’s book is just the first in a series of similarly crafted books on important and visually rich films. Alien fanatics will certainly want to invest in the Vault if for no other reason than to see Giger’s grotesque early design for the creature he christened the “degenerate plucked turkey.”