Artist & Author: Hannes Bok & Others

How often is the artist also the author of a Fantasy work? After looking over a selection of J R. R. Tolkien’s own artwork for The Hobbit, I got wondering how many writers were also their own illustrators. The most obvious example is Mervyn Peake (1911-1968), Tolkien’s contemporary, who called JRR “that old windbag”. Peake was making a living as an illustrator when he wrote the Gormenghast books. Peake was a major influence on Michael Moorcock, so his talents are not solely those of illustrator.

I suppose there is a tradition in England for writing/illustrating that begins with William Morris (1834-1896), that genius of wallpaper and chairs who also wrote the first fantasy novels and decorated them in his own medieval style. The idea of doing so probably didn’t seem to unusual to Tolkien who followed in Morris’s tracks. In America, Howard Pyle (1853-1911) also plied both sides of the trade, illustrating his own classics like The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1904).

I thought of Pulp writers next. I remembered that Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was quite a good cartoonist in this youth but he never ventured to illustrate any of his own books. He made some sketches of creatures like the Va-gas as well as maps but these were solely designs meant to help him write.

In Weird Tales, we find a couple of writers who illustrated their own work. Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) did a brief stint as his own illustrator around 1933. He used an odd dotty style. As an illustrator he was certainly no worse than A. R. Tilburne or H. R. Hammond, perhaps better.

Another brief glimpse of drawing talent was when C. L. Moore (1911-1987) illustrated her own story “The Dark Land” (Weird Tales, January 1936). As far as I know she never repeated the feat.

Perhaps the king of writing/illustrating in the Pulps goes to Hannes Bok (1914-1964). Both an accomplished cover and illustration artist, he wrote for such publications as John W. Campbell’s Unknown. An acolyte of Abraham Merritt (1884-1943), Bok even completed some Merritt stories like the sequel to “The Fox Woman”, called “The Blue Pagoda” and the novel, The Black Wheel. I thought it would be ironic if Bok never illustrated his own stories but this is not so. He did the cover and illo for “The Alien Vibration” (Future, February 1942) and his novel, The Sorcerer’s Ship (Unknown, December 1942) as well as others.

One time, Bok was illustrated by another SF writer who gave up art, Damon Knight. Maybe Bok wished he hadn’t…

Today the combo of artist & author is not unheard of with writer/artists like Janny Wurts (1953-) being prolific in both fields. What publisher would not be interested in getting both artist & author in one fell swoop?