NOURS Magazine - Kyozo Hayashi

 

Well there I was, rooting around on Archive.org, as I am wont to do, and I came across a collection of Japanese gamer mags put out by NAMCO in the 1990s. I can't read a word of it, but am immediately seized by awe at the covers. 

At first I was, "How?" Was it an early use of computer graphics? Seemed too smooth. Are they amazingly deceptive trompe-l'oeil paintings? Is it done with paper cut outs? Then my mind begged, "Who?"

After some internet sleuthing, utilizing the only clue I had – the signature "Kyozo" under the little umbrella mark on the lower righthand corner of a few of the covers – the only hint I was able to glean that pointed to an answer was a couple of copies of the above-pictured book for sale on eBay. Kyozo Hayashi is an artist and designer who seemingly specializes in working with clay figures for his work. 

I absolutely love the meshing of Art Deco and Pop Art in Kyozo's aesthetic. At some point the art direction seems to have been revised to fit a more "normal" newsstand gamer mag aesthetic, with Manga-style art or pictures of the characters from the games the magazine was reviewing that month. It makes sense from a marketing standpoint, but man, these covers are works of art!

If you want to go spelunking in the cave of NOURS digital back issues, the gateway to your cavern is here.

As for Kyozo Hayashi himself, he was born in 1939 and graduated from the Industrial Art department of the Nagoya Municipal Polytechnic High School. He began his clay illustration career around 1967, and received multiple awards for his design work and had a number of traveling art shows in the late 1980s. He appears to have an Instagram account, where he primarily showcases digital illustration these days. 

Haunted House

Late last night I was flipping through the August 1983 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, a British video game enthusiast publication, and came across this great illustration for the game Haunted House. Apparently the magazine was initially aimed more at coders than your casual arcade enthusiast, as most game spotlight articles feature pictures of long blocks of code rather than any in depth look at the games themselves.

The illustration is signed Gulbis. I have no idea if this is some early work by the self-proclaimed "Football Artist" Stephen Gulbis, or not. When you Google his name a lot of early home console video game packaging comes up, none of it explicitly linked to that same Steve Gulbis. Gulbis is British, and though he touts having built a career on solely drawing soccer players and American football players for various markets, I have to imagine he'd had to diversify somewhat at some point. You wouldn't know it to look at his website, though. 

The subject matter, obviously, made the piece stick out for me, but ghosts and skeletons aside, I really like the limited cool color palette with the high contrast of the black shadows. I also really like the Dutch angle perspective, it really adds a sense of high drama to the image that a straight-on version of the image would lack. 

Haunted Hot Rods

I was, and still am, I guess, a monster kid. I think I have shared before the story about how one fateful afternoon in the 1980s I was exposed to Tod Browning's Dracula, and my mind was suitably blown and primed to seek out monster movies, and related ephemera, from that point forward. Of course to present that as the moment I was introduced to monsters in the pop cultural sense, would be inaccurate, because I had by that point, already been toddling around in Incredible Hulk t-shirts since I was in diapers, and had had a shoe box full of Masters Of The Universe figures–a large number of which were monsters of various sorts. 

As I grew older, and my interests diversified, monsters (more so than straight "horror") stuck with me. And as I got into comic books, and later music and other things, I found these amazing overlaps in the spheres of the Venn Diagram of my hobbies. There's surf music about monsters?! There are comic books with monster stories?! I quickly grew to favor supernatural comic book characters like Deadman, Ghost Rider, Werewolf By Night and Swamp Thing, and scoured the weekly TV Guide for listings of monster and sci-fi movies on AMC (back when they were more akin to what TCM is now, than a version of early 90s HBO). Fortunately the late 80s/early 90s burgeoning basic cable market was flush with shows like Werewolf, Forever Knight and Monsters, and the Universal Monsters were back in vogue, popping up in everything from toys to Doritos packaging.  

As I pursued these various interests I found that the offerings to discover were often unilaterally declining in quality the more recently they were produced. Straight-to-video horror might have a certain outsider charm to it, but something like Galaxy of Terror or Creature didn't seem to hold a candle to Creature From The Black Lagoon or The Mad Ghoul. I don't like gore if it's the focal point of a movie/comic/novel, I don't enjoy films about groups of people, often teenagers or thirty-somethings playing teenagers, being systematically butchered in novel ways by some psychopath in a mask. I also don't have time for parodic material that doesn't respect the source. Was I whole-heartedly obsessed with The Misfits when they crossed my path? You bet! But metal that glorifies senseless brutality, not so much. 

Yadda yadda yadda. My brand of horror has always been more Hammer Films, Boris Karloff, EC Comics and Famous Monsters of Filmland than Fangoria, Rob Zombie and the hyper graphic Twisted Tales. That isn't to say there isn't a great deal of contemporary horror stuff that I greatly enjoy, but prior to the 1970s the idea seemed to be providing entertainment, not entrails. I like a bit of fun with my fear and there's lots of great stuff buried in the past if you dig for it. I've dug out a 1964 issue of Pete Millar's Drag Cartoons magazine to share today. It's a quick little hot rod monster mash produced by noted animation designer and cartoonist Alex Toth. Page 3 is a little faded but still reads just fine. Note the resemblance of the Monster in this strip to Dick Briefer's design for the creature in his Frankenstein comics (pictured below).

Cartoonist Dick Briefer had two different creature 
designs for two different iterations of his Frankenstein comics,
one humorous and cartoony, one menacing for straight horror
stories. The above is a panel from a horror-oriented 1954 issue.

 I'm not a gearhead by any measure; both of my grandfathers were career body men for various dealerships, my appreciation, however, is more or less confined to the aesthetic appeal of vintage car body design and the George Barris TV car creations, hence why I have the source material for this here post.

Enjoy.