Adult coloring books are all the rage…well, here is one with an all-star cast from long ago!
Colour Your Dreams: 1972
Edited by Joel Pollack and Robert Lewis
Hello all and thanks for stopping by! This month will be short on words and long on images…and gorgeous images they will be! This month the focus is on what appears, by the title and the black and white imagery, to be a coloring book utilizing some of the best artists of the 70s (and before). Feast your eyes on Colour Your Dreams (despite the spelling, it was published out of Springfield, Virginia). Not quite a fanzine, though it does feature a few fandom regulars like Dave Cockrum, Steve Hickman, and Dennis Fujitake. You can see the typically elegant Jeff Jones piece above, as well as a smaller one below, alongside the aforementioned Fujitake (whose work from this period had a Jeff Jones-ish look about it).
In fact, all 4 members of The Studio appear in this beautiful collection…Jones twice, and Kaluta, Barry Smith and Berni Wrightson each contribution one piece each. You can see the other three below. I believe Barry’s piece was a sample page used when he was trying to become a pro.
In addition to all the then current artists included in this zine, editors Pollack and Lewis also include some of the all time greats of illustration/fantasy illustration, such as Norman Lindsay, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, J. Allen St. John, and Arthur Rackham. If you end up in Australia, feel free to visit the Lindsay museum, which you can find out more about here. Below you see the pages by the first two artists mentioned from that group.
Fandom stalwart Dave Cockrum shows another one of his beautiful female characters below, and editor Pollack also shows his mettle.
In addition to a few of the comic professionals I mentioned earlier, there are also pieces by Howard Chaykin and Walt Simonson, the latter seen below.
Below is another highly regarded artist from an earlier period, Henry Pitz. Ironically, Pitz died at home just a few years after this collection was published. You can read a bio of Pitz by his widow, Mary, here.
Other artists included in this amazing collection are Phil Trumbo, Mike Nally, Lawrence Kamp, John Linton, Yvon Sovereign, Fred H. Ball, Eric Friedrichs, Marc Cheshire, Verlon Vrana, Roy Krenkel, and Sherry Ives. Get the pdf on my site (kenmeyerjr.com, in the Ink Stains pull down tab) to see all of them.
Thanks go out this time to Greg Turner, who loaned me this zine, as well as several others that will see the light of day in this column at a later date. Greg has a ton of great stuff he is graciously loaning me and you can find him on Facebook to say thanks! He also has probably the most completely annotated fanzine list I can remember seeing (sorry, Aaron!). Upcoming subjects courtesy of Greg will include Chronicle 4, Comic and Crypt 6, Imagination 1, as well as others not quite in my hands yet. I am looking forward to them as much as I hope you are. Comment below if you have the time!
Ken Meyer Jr.
kenmeyerjr@yahoo.com
Great art ! Hard to find stuff ! Many thanks for sharing !
Glad you liked it and thanks for commenting!
Wow! I just looked up more Jeff Jones art and the guy is phenomenal! Thanks!
Ohhh yeah…if you do not know this guy at all, you are really in for something. He was one of our best painters, and did some really cool comic work as well.
Thanks yet again!
I think the Kaluta piece was probably a proposed cover for Strange Adventures 238, by the way. I can’t figure out how to insert the image, but if you google it, you can see it’s a different treatment of the same idea.
thanks!
I seriously appreciate coming here to check out this column because no one else is keeping classic works like these out for the comic fans of today to get to know.
thanks, Matt…I really do want as many as possible to see these in their entirety…they meant a lot to me long ago.