Impressive, most impressive


Bidding ended today on a collection of Star Wars figures on eBay, rather a LARGE collection by anyone’s standards, in fact this is supposed to be over 85% of all Star Wars figures of this scale ever produced since 1978. The collection of nearly 2,000 figures was sold for $11,500 and were donated by one-time ILM model maker Fon Davis to benefit the Rancho Obi-Wan charity.


I’ve taken these images from the eBay listing, each shelf is a large jpeg which you can zoom into by clicking. SW figures aren’t personally my thing save for a few of the older ones from my childhood but that is a collection and a half.

Posted in Star Wars, Toys. | No Comments |

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Did you know that almost the entire Folkways label is available online to order and nearly every one of over 2,000 releases isn’t ever supposed to be out of print?

When the label was acquired by the Smithsonian Institute one of the wishes of founder, Moses Asch, was that virtually all of the catalogue was to be kept in print.

You can currently order any release on their site as a custom CD, a download or even a cassette! No vinyl as that just wouldn’t be practical but there’s eBay, Discogs and used stores for that. This is just a handful of my favourite sleeves from nearly 100 pages of releases.

There’s also a nice little feature on Ronald Clyne who designed over 500 of the sleeves and is widely recognised as the originator of the Folkways house style. Unit Editions did a beautiful newspaper-style release about his work a few years back which is now sadly sold out.

Posted in Music. | 1 Comment |

Flint & Food prints available at Orbital Comics, London

All four giclee prints I did with Henry Flint are now available in Orbital comics, 8 Great Newport Street, WC2H 7JA just off Charing Cross Rd. in London. They also have copies of the comic book / flexi disc / CD edition of ‘The Search Engine’ and Henry’s ‘Broadcast’ book along with a fine selection of comics, books, vintage toys and a small gallery space which is always interesting. Highly recommended.

It looks like there will be a fifth print soon too by way of a revitalised Scraffer.com, a smaller A3 size of ‘Planets’, an illustration that appeared on the ‘One Man’s Weird Is Another Man’s World’ EP. Talking of which, the 4 x 12″ repress package (the three EPs plus the Amorphous Androgynous remix 12″) is at the printers but it might be held over until Record Store Day in April now, I’m not sure. More info when I have it.

Posted in Art, Comics, DJ Food, Poster / flyer. | No Comments |

Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree comics

This is so well done, the unfolding history of Hip Hop, drawn by Ed Piskor in the style of old 70’s underground comics by Crumb or Pekar. Starting in 1975 and continuing on into the 80’s Ed has been putting chapters on Boing Boing and they will be collected next year in print form. Love the yellowed paper, faded ink and retro vibe of it all, I wonder if he’ll change style as he moves along to mirror the historical changes in art?

Posted in Comics, Music. | 2 Comments |

Falling

I found this amazing image on a tumblr the other day, as usual the person who had posted it hadn’t bothered to credit it. Anyone know who it’s by? It reminds me of (and is probably an homage to) this image by Moebius. It has ‘Jodorowsky – something’ in the bottom corner so I’m wondering if it’s actually a later version of this scene by Moebius for a graphic novel cover or something?

*UPDATE – and it’s David Rees for the win, in record time he responds: “A little light Googling suggests it’s from the ‘Final Incal’, by Alejandro Jodorowsky and José Omar Ladrönn“. Notice the similarity to the Zaucer of Zilk page I posted earlier (which, incidentally David helped me acquire)? I wonder if this was McCarthy’s homage to Moebius too?

Posted in Art, Comics. | 1 Comment |

The The – ‘Infected’ LP test pressing and proof cover

Digging in the MVE in Berwick St. yesterday I came across this in the mid-price section. It appears to be a test pressing of The The‘s classic ‘Infected’ LP with uncut / glued cover and inner sleeve plus Epic credit sheet. This album (by Matt Johnson – who I worked with on ‘The Search Engine’ – and collaborators) is one of my all time favourite records EVER. Serious Desert Island Disc stuff which will stay with me until I die.

I already own the original vinyl, CD, remastered CD and limited ‘Torture’ cover with poster versions. I even had a signed proof cover of another, largely unknown sleeve design with a cow skull on it that I bought from Andy Dog (the cover artist and Matt’s brother) years ago but it was mistakenly thrown out in a house move as it was stored inside a 12″ mailer! Gutted…

Posted in Records. | 7 Comments |

R.I.P. Ewan Robertson 1985-2012

I was shocked to hear of the death of Ewan Robertson yesterday, one half of design duo Oscar & Ewan who created many iconic covers for Ninja Tune and Big Dada g others. Ewan also recorded as Offshore for Big Dada and had just released his first album only a month ago –‘Bake Haus’.  Alongside Oscar Bauer, Ewan created some iconic sleeves for the labels including Roots Manuva, Wiley, Bonobo and the recent Amon Tobin set housed inside a ‘flower press’.

I only met him once or twice – first at the exhibition for the release of the Ninja Tune ’20 years of Beats & Pieces’ book – and he was friendly, humble and easy to talk to. We’d corresponded over email many times in order to get his and Oscar’s work well represented in the book and he graciously agreed to show the plaster cast of Roots Manuva’s head they’d made for the ‘Slime & Reason’ LP campaign at the opening.

He was always super helpful and supplied many exclusive images from behind the scenes which showed the processes they went through when designing. My thoughts go out to his family and friends, he left a small but striking caché of music and visuals behind that will ensure he isn’t forgotten.

Posted in Design, Event. | 1 Comment |

First full look at Pacific Rim’s Jaeger robots

The first trailer drops on Dec 10th but here’s a look at the Gipsy Danger monster-fighting Jaeger bot from Guillermo Del Toro’s forthcoming Pacific Rim film, due out next July. The silhouette of a human at the bottom shows the scale of it.

And now there’s a second one, a Russian ‘Cherno Alpha‘ bot, there are also a couple of teaser films doing the rounds and ‘leaked documents’ relating to these blueprints.

And then there were four five: that’s some BIG robot action next year

Posted in Design, Film. | 4 Comments |

2000ad prog 1811

This is next week’s 2000ad with amazing wraparound cover by D’israeli (I subscribe so get it 4 days early). Not content with celebrating 35 years worth of publishing, the Dredd3D film and Prog 1800 in 2012, the comic has gone into uncharted territory in what is proving to be a golden year for them.

2000ad is an anthology title with four or five different strips running each week featuring characters in – usually – unrelated worlds. Without warning a month ago events in three of the strips suddenly began to intertwine and form a much bigger story which has grown to epic proportions since. Centered around Judge Dredd and the fallout from the equally epic ‘Day of Chaos’ story earlier this year, they’ve managed to outdo themselves AGAIN with this slice of storytelling.

Comics have crossed over before and plenty of universes and characters have fought with and against each other over the decades but the beauty of 2000ad is that they’re all contained in one place. To have several all suddenly tie together without even a single mention is genius. In any other comic this would have been trailed and trumpeted for months preceding its arrival in the hope of attracting press and attention for the title. Rather than underestimating their reader’s intelligence 2000ad has chosen to sneak this upon us with no warning and this is why they’re still the galaxy’s greatest.

Also this week, the other two strips not part of the tri-story arc have now concluded, leaving next week’s climax to play out across the whole issue! I’m looking forward to seeing how they intertwine the three strips and different artist’s styles – will they be separate stories or one huge strip with contrasting panels on each page? Whatever they do it will be the end of an incredible year for the title which concludes with their annual 100 page 2013 issue in 2 weeks before taking a break for Xmas. There’s never been a better time to be reading this, either physically or digitally.

UPDATE: There’s a fascinating post over on Pete Wells‘ 2000ad Covers Uncovered site about the making of this stunning cover.

Posted in Art, Comics. | 3 Comments |

Vangelis – Sex Power!

Being on a bit of a Vangelis trip recently I decided to check out his back catalogue on Discogs and see what I was missing. One of his first outings was this soundtrack to the French film ‘Sex Power’, starring Jane Birkin amongst others (makes mental note to track that one down).

More reasons why a resource like Discogs is so essential these days (something I touched on a few weeks back) – it may not be complete but it’s as indespensible to me as Wikipedia.

Posted in Uncategorized. | 1 Comment |

New DJ Food mix of Israeli esoterica and radiophonica

On a recent trip to Tel Aviv I was given a huge amount of music, both new and old, from Israel and was knocked out by the quality of it. These form the bulk of a new mix for Solid Steel and you can see a heavy bias towards the Mordy Laye and the Group Modular record I posted about the other week which is now out on vinyl and download.
Hear and buy the album in full here or hop over to group member Markey Funk’s Mixcloud page to digest one of his great Modular mixes. He, along with group partner Mule Driver, will be putting together a special Solid Steel guest mix soon…

Posted in Mixes/Solid Steel, Solid Steel. | 1 Comment |

The Octoplayer

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”350″]http://vimeo.com/50267638#[/vimeo]

Created by Mark Taylor and Thad Povey. Love the painted records creating sounds when the needle hits, what fun you could have with this although it’s not immediately obvious how you could change each record.

 

Posted in Records. | No Comments |

Transfusion – Vampires vs Robots from IDW

This looks promising, we’ve had vampires vs werewolves, vampires vs zombies, vampires vs vampires, now… vampires versus robots.

Actually it seems that the tagline here is a bit misleading and the robots are actually vampires (not sure how that works).

Nevertheless, the art – by Menton3 –  is gorgeous, reminding me of Ashley Wood‘s work back when he was in his comic prime or the old Kent Williams/Jon J Muth Wolverine book.

Forget Transformers, this is Transfusion – a 3 issue series, written by Steve Niles. that just debuted from IDW, I’ve not read it yet but it looks pretty bleak as it’s set in the future where the remnants of the human race are hunted by robots who need blood to survive.

There’s a short preview from issue 1 over on CBR.

Posted in Comics. | No Comments |