Monsters & Minis

Finally, this week, we have Magical World of Monsters (1992), a collaboration between artist Erni Cabat and writer Daniel Cohen.

I hadn’t heard of Cabat before I went on my spree of buying up all the Daniel Cohen books I could lay my hands on. Seems he spent most of his career in advertising and only began illustrating toward the end of his life (he was also a ceramics artist, collaborating with his wife, Rose, who had a pretty significant career of her own). In addition to Monsters, he produces Magical World books for prehistoric animals, carousel animals and dinosaurs, all in the same basic format. His style is rather hard to describe. I suppose I would start with “garish.” They’re a swirling combination of texture, pattern and unusual color choices that are difficult to visually parse. There is so much detail in the Medusa head, for instance, and the tonal range so compressed, that my eye can’t stop in any one place for long, to the point that it seems like her hair of snakes is perhaps really squirming. The sense of motion in all of these pieces almost verges on vertigo. They’re pretty amazing!

The selection of monsters seems mostly governed by what Erni wanted to paint. Cohen is there to provide the slightest bit of context. It all hangs together fine, Cohen knows who the star is here.

SQUIGS SQUIGS SQUIGS!!!

Games Workshop and Warhammer would be nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, without him.

He was the beating heart of GW's worlds, made theses little toy games feel like they had a whole universe behind them.

His body of work is STAGGERING, and the amount detail he packed into each piece truly dwarfed the game itself.

One of the Lords.

Farewell.

The whole Omensworn family!

And that's it! Due to picture limitations no close ups of the marauders or two hand weapon warriors here but they're in other images I think. I know the marauders are at least! Now to focus on my Orks

Michael Newton’s Monsters, Mysteries and Man was a bit of a mystery for me for many years. I remembered it from my local library (it was at the Main, which I didn’t go to as much as the closer, smaller Branch). I had gotten it out before a trip to my grandparents' house and I distinctly remember reading it in bed there in almost one sitting. I remembered that it had a garish monster head on the cover and that the title reminded me of Richard Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic series, but that was all I could remember. Searching, for years, on the internet, turned up zilch.

And then, sometimes, I find that magic combination of words on the right site and boom, there it is, the thing I was looking for all those years. The site in question was Archive.org, so hey, you can read it too. The dust jacket is magnificent, isn’t it?

The text was a bit less noteworthy all these years later. It’s a general survey of crytpids — Yeti, Sasquatch, surviving dinosaurs, sea and lake monsters, Kraken, Nessie, UFOs — and the efforts to find and study them. Two more chapters cover vampires and werewolves, but they are half-hearted because there’s no meaningful chance that they are real. And that’s what Newton wants. He’s the opposite of skeptical Daniel Cohen; the whole book is arranged around finding the small holes of doubt in the skeptic’s argument and filling them to brimming with the hope of the believer. Considering not much has changed on any of these fronts in my lifetime, I don’t expect they ever will. Sorry Mike.