Fantastic People
(1980 - Pierrot Publishing / Galahad Books)

(by Allan Scott & Michael Scott Rohan) This book rubs me the wrong way. Text-wise, it's one thing to have a book about, say, dragons, which posits all the dragon legends may actually be true and here's what they related, and it's another thing to create your own new overarching mythological tale and then relate all the legends, twisting some to fit them into your conceit ( i.e. "The people involved [in The Elves And The Shoemaker] were certainly not elves . . . it seems to have been a group of unusually amiable dwarves . . ."). This book does the latter. While all is laid out tongue-in-cheekly with a wink-and-a-nudge, you can see that it was annoying enough to me to distract from the not insignificant amount of art to be found here. But I say the art was frequently handled poorly as well. Each of the chapters begins with an isolated painting presented against a creamy yellow background, but the paintings are reproduced at about a third of the size they could be. Contrast that with about a dozen paintings that are presented so large as to have about a fifth of each work crosses the gutter to the next page - and they join about another dozen full double-page-spreads that are barely acceptable - not to mention a number of featured Arthur Rackham spot drawings split over the gutter for no reason ! At least two color paintings are presented in black-&-white. There are 15-or-so seemingly needless interstitial blank pages throughout the manuscript. The three pages devoted to identifying the artists of the pieces has errors and omissions that leave some pieces unidentified. The book is just a tad thicker than it should be, by our lights. With all that ranting, there is still a lot of nice art here. The chapters are In The Beginning, Gods-Titans-&-Dragons, Trolls, Dwarves, Shape-Shifters, Semi-Humans, Vampires-Ghosts-&-Ghouls, The Water Folk, The Green People, Witches, Elves, and Demons, so you get an idea of the subjects of the depictions. Imagine the work of Rackham, Dulac and Nielsen and you'll have the stylistic tone of the collection, but there are some striking, more realistic images to be found as well. The works seem to have been originally used for other purposes, but captioned here as specific illustrations for the treatise. The artists 'well-presented' here are: Stephen Adams, Wayne Anderson (6), John Blanche (5), Pete Bowman (8), Jim Burns (3), Sue Cartwright, Gordon Crabb, Edmund Dulac (3)***, Sean Eckett (2), Les Edwards (8), Jonathan Field, Linda Garland (3), Roger Garland (3), Yvonne Gilbert (2), Peter Goodfellow (3), John Harris**, Susan Hellard, Robin Hiddon (2), Tony Linsell (3), B. Lofthouse, Kay Nielsen (2), Terry Oakes (2), Arthur Rackham (30), Rita Renella (4), Tony Roberts, Dave Roe, Roger Webb (4) and UNKNOWN (2).

** - Note that the 'well-presented' piece here by Harris, cannot additionally be found so in his own collection on The List.

*** - Note that in regards to Dulac's 'well-presented' pieces here, some, but not all, additionally appear so in his own collection higher up The List.

Other Fantasy Art Collections

The Studio