Coulthart, John
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Artist.
(1962- ) UK artist, author, designer and illustrator, perhaps best known for his various collaboration with David Britton in the Lord Horror sequence, in which a savagely scatological black Alternate History of the twentieth century culminates in a World War Two dominated by Lord Horror, a grotesque Parody of the English traitor William Joyce (1906-1946), who was nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw. Not all the Lord Horror novels contain work by Coulthart [see entry on Britton for them], but his influence is strong in the two Graphic Novels created in co-ordination with the prose texts, Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror and Lord Horror: Reverbstorm [for individual titles see Checklist below]. The most concentrated access to Coulthart's quotation-drenched expressionist vision – with its echoes of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, its analogues with the work of H R Giger and the later Jake Tilson, and its sophisticated citing of many other artists – is probably Lord Horror: Reverbstorm (graph 2012), which assembles and augments the entire run of the series, which had been released in comic-book format. Though much of the surface execution of the work reflects the rhetoric and iconography of the underground comic of the 1970s and later, the heart of Lord Horror: Reverbstorm seems to reside in its toxically intimate conversation with earlier artists and writers (including James Joyce and Pablo Picasso) whose execution of the twentieth century in words and images could be understood as pointing to its sublimity and its horror. The pages move, and the characters depicted evolve and devolve (see Decadence; Devolution), through a slow-motion shuttlecocking between what is visible (see Fantastika; Horror in SF) and what is quoted out of the depths of that time. Lord Haw-Haw himself is the abiding impresario of the carnival.
Coulthart's work as an illustrator replicates, almost always in a modestly sanitized idiom, a central sense of the inner appallingness of the world. Conventional aspirations after being beauteous are not necessarily eschewed, and individual panels or covers can give straightforward aesthetic pleasure; but there is always a conspiratorial sense that what may not be seen is the true story. [JC]
John Coulthart
born England: 15 March 1962
works (selected)
series
Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror (Coulthart issues only)
- Lord Horror 4: Hard Core Horror 2: Churchill's Tick-Tock Men (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1990) with David Britton, Kris Guidio and Harry Douthwaite [graph: Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror: pb/Harry Douthwaite, Kris Guidio and John Coulthart]
- Lord Horror 5: Hard Core Horror 3: Horror Time for Hitler (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1990) with David Britton and Kris Guidio [graph: Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror: pb/Kris Guidio and John Coulthart]
- Lord Horror 6: Hard Core Horror 4: Entropy Going Down Slow (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1990) with David Britton and Kris Guidio [graph: Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror: pb/Kris Guidio and John Coulthart]
- Lord Horror 7: Hard Core Horror 5: King Horror Zero (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1990) with David Britton [graph: Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror: pb/John Coulthart]
Lord Horror: Reverbstorm
- Lord Horror 8: Reverbstorm 1: Our Lord of Fuck Off (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1994) with David Britton and Kris Guidio [graph: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm: pb/John Coulthart and Kris Guidio]
- Lord Horror 9: Reverbstorm 2: The Land of Love-It-To-Death (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1994) with David Britton [graph: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm: pb/John Coulthart]
- Lord Horror 10: Reverbstorm 3: The Big Beat of Apes (Bo Diddley Meets William Hope Hodgson) (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1994) with David Britton and Kris Guidio [graph: William Hope Hodgson: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm: pb/John Coulthart and Kris Guidio]
- Lord Horror 11: Reverbstorm 4: The Auschwitz of Oz (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1995) with David Britton [graph: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm: pb/John Coulthart]
- Lord Horror 12: Reverbstorm 5: The Running Dogs of Anthony Powell (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1996) with David Britton [graph: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm: pb/John Coulthart]
- Lord Horror 13: Reverbstorm 6: The Razor Kings on Mars (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1997) with David Britton and Kris Guidio [graph: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm: pb/The Inimitable Miss M]
- Lord Horror 14: Reverbstorm 7: Juden Wars l (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 2000) with David Britton [graph: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm: pb/John Coulthart]
- Lord Horror: Reverbstorm (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 2012) with David Britton [omni of the above seven plus additional material: graph: graph: illus/hb/John Coulthart]
individual titles
- The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions (London: Creation Oneiros, 1999) [coll: graph: adaptations of H P Lovecraft: pb/John Coulthart]
- The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions (London: Creation Oneiros, 1999) [coll: graph: exp of the above: adaptations of H P Lovecraft: pb/John Coulthart]
links
previous versions of this entry