Outermost - The Art + Life Of Jack Gaughan
                                             (2010 - Nonstop Press)  

     (by Luis Ortiz)  This book is troublesome.  It may be the only book to ever focus on this gifted artist, but it does not measure up as a good collection, in my opinion.  I feel the first object of its creators was to share the life story of this now-lesser-known shaper of science-fiction popularity from 50-odd years ago.  He uniquely provided a striking middle-ground between the surrealism of Richard Powers and the realism of most others.  It's very admirable to show us who he was through his biography.  I suspect most of his original paintings are 'in the wild' as only a handful appear here - most color covers are reproduced from the books & magazines themselves.  After those, and the finished spot drawings included here, the book is totally dependent on the huge amount of sketches, roughs, thumbnails and alternate versions he left behind - and so many of these were in service of the finished product that frequently happens to be included alongside them as well.  Out of 176 pages, only 26 individual artworks could be said to dominate the page they're featured on and then 113 more pages are a jumbled gathering of two, four, or six images.  The captions suffer as well - they provide where the image comes from (again, so many of them are from his sketchbooks), its creation-date and, if it was in particular service of a story, that title is given.  There are so many smaller images that each caption apparently can't be given its own 'space', so instead, every couple of pages has a large block of text encompassing the captions for those several pages presented as if they were some long run-on sentence.  Interestingly, some particular works are mentioned specifically in the text and when those works appear in this book, it is almost always on some other page than where the text is.  While this tome can stand as a great biography, I hope some other edition can be the gallery Gaughan deserves.

Other Nonstop Press releases

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