The Fifth

Here’s the fifth of six page division designs for Marly Youman’s forthcoming novel, Maze of Blood, due out in September this year. The book lightly fictionalises the life and death of American novelist Robert E. Howard. There are examinations throughout it to the ‘pulp’ genre Howard’s work occupied. He was published throughout his career in ‘Weird Tales’ magazine, and is probably best remembered today as being the creator of Conan the Barbarian.

The drawings, which are variously embellished versions of a man’s head, are intended as poetic expressions of the text rather than as representing specific episodes. Because I had only six images to play with, I tried to densely layer my ideas, so any one drawing might be seen to be referencing multiple aspects of the narrative. Vegetation and flowers figure strongly in Marly’s text, as do the imaginative universes the protagonist conjures in his novels and short stories. I wanted to combine both in this image, and so while the ‘flowering’ has been informed by aspects of American folk-art… particularly appliqué-quilts… by setting it like the crest of a headdress, it can simultaneously echo of some of the writer’s elaborate inventions of ancient and mythic cultures.

In each image the man’s eye has been replaced by a substitute. There’s been a beetle, a flower, the sighting of a revolver and a coiled ribbon of paper. Here a ‘folk-art’ bird is the stand-in, and I like that the plumes of its tail might be seen as ‘tears of blood’.

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