First Maitz: Selected Works by Don Maitz

First Maitz
Selected Works by Don Maitz
Ursus Imprints 1988

If you read sf and fantasy books at any time in the late 70s, 80s, or early 90s, then it's highly likely that at least one of those books featured cover art by Don Maitz (b. 1953).

Raised in Plainville, Connecticut, Maitz attended the Paier School of Art in Hamden, from which he graduated in 1975 - the same year he got his first commercial art assignment, for Marvel comics.

A year later, Maitz provided the cover artwork for the Science Fiction Book Club's The Book of Skaith, as well as cover art for the Dell paperback Flashing Swords 3: Warriors and Wizards, launching his prolific career as a cover artist in the sf and fantasy genres.

'First Maitz' provides artwork from Maitz's career through 1988; many of the featured pieces were commissioned by DAW Books and will be very familiar to anyone with experience with that publisher's catalog from the late 70s through the 80s.

One thing that is quickly apparent from looking through 'First Maitz' is that the author is very adept both at composing artwork with a more abstract, figurative aspect, as well as art with a more realistic tenor. Maitz's work is very much allied to that of the classic illustrators such as Maxfield Parish and N. C Wyeth. 

Each of the reproductions of Matiz's paintings is accompanied by a text description offering details of the processes by which Maitz came up with the composition and design of the illustration, as well as preliminary black-and-white sketches and the occasional reference photograph. 

Maitz makes clear that reading the book he has been assigned to illustrate is a vital component of rendering satisfactory cover art, although this action - along with all of the others associated with producing commercial art - can lead to anxiety as deadlines come due......

cover art for Flashing Swords 4, Dell, 1977

'First Maitz' (96 pp) is a well-made book; the artwork is reproduced on a finer grade of paper stock, pages are sewn into the binding (not glued), and the quality of the reproductions is very high. Copies can be had from the usual used-book online vendors for very reasonable prices. If you're a fan of fantasy and sf art, or a fan of novels in the genre from the 70s and 80s, then you may well want to get a copy of 'First Maitz'.

cover art for The Green Gods, DAW Books 1980

The Pirate, Captain Morgan Co., Baltimore, MD

cover artwork for four novels in the Bard series, Ace Books, 1981 - 1987

cover artwork for The Shadow of the Torturer, Pocket Books, 1981

cover artwork for Electric Forest, DAW Books, 1979

cover artwork for Fane, Pocket Books, 1981

cover artwork for The Purgatory Zone, Ace Books, 1981

Book Review: Helliconia Spring

Book Review:'Helliconia Spring' by Brian Aldiss

2 / 5 Stars

‘Helliconia Spring’ first was published in hardback in 1982; this Berkley paperback (433 pp) was released in November, 1984. The cover artist is uncredited.

‘Helliconia Spring’ is the first volume of the trilogy; later volumes are ‘Helliconia Summer’ (1983) and ‘Helliconia Winter’ (1985).

[During the 70s and early 80s, lengthy novels were a linchpin of general fiction publishing; 600+ page tomes from James Michener (Centennial, Chesapeake) and James Clavell (Shogun) were bestsellers. Science fiction came rather late to this aspect of publishing, with Dune (1965) and Dhalgren (1975) the only representatives, until the advent of the early 80s, and ‘Helliconia Spring’.]

The premise of the Helliconia series is straightforward: the planet circles its two binary suns at a leisurely pace; so leisurely, in fact, that a ‘year’ is equivalent to 2,592 days, and winter lasts for the equivalent of nearly 600 Earth years. The ecology of Helliconia is thus geared towards enduring, and then exploiting, protracted periods of cold and dark followed by abundant sunshine and warmth.

The human inhabitants of Helliconia (their presence on the planet is never explained, but they are presumed to have evolved from a race of Helliconian primates known as ‘protognostics’) share the planet with a humanoid race of goat-people called phagors; there is frequent enmity between the two races.

Winter life for the humans on Helliconia is nasty, brutish and short. Technology is at the bronze-age level, and misery and squalor are simply facts of existence.

Much of the narrative of 'Helliconia Spring' deals with the lives of the people of the village of Oldorando, who live in ignorance and superstition among the ruins of a previous civilization - one established centuries ago during the Great Summer, only to disintegrate with the coming of the Winter.

The main plot revolves around the personal melodramas and political conflicts of a large cast of characters, who must struggle with the psychological and social traumas triggered by the massive environmental changes accompanying the advent of Spring. An overarching plot device deals with the impending arrival of a large phagor army, whose leader seeks to burn Oldorando to the ground.

The events of the main narrative are regularly interspersed with pedantic expositions on the environmental science of Helliconia, and its plant and animal life.

I found ‘Helliconia Spring’ to be ponderous and unrewarding. The plot had just enough momentum to keep me from tossing the novel aside due to boredom, but that’s it’s only saving grace.

The book is badly overwritten; much of Aldiss’s prose has the self-conscious leanings of an author who is determined to be ‘literary’:

A heat message thrilled along the five hundred-mile length of the glacier, as it spilled down from the airless plateau of High Nktryhk to the excoriated valleys east of the Oldorandan plain, drawing out ancipitals from its eaves and crevices.

Using ‘excoriated’ to describe a valley is just one of the steady stream of thesaurus-derived, awkward phrasings that mark the prose style of ‘Helliconia Spring’. Readers will need to gird themselves to encounter such words as ‘eotemporal’, ‘ripicolous’ (or 'rupicolous'), ‘hypogean’, ‘expatiate’, ‘renasence’, ‘exsiccated’, ‘obtend’, and Aldiss’s favorite adjective, ‘cthonic’.

I can’t help comparing ‘Helliconia Spring’ to another high-profile 80s sf trilogy: Harry Harrison’s ‘Eden’ series, which started just two years later, in 1984. 

Harrison’s trilogy is just as ambitious as Aldiss’s in terms of its creation of a planetary ecology, and the maintenance of a complex cast of characters. But the quality of Harrison’s prose, and the overall readability of the ‘Eden’ trilogy, markedly are superior to ‘Helliconia’.

Summing up, only die-hard Aldiss fans are going to want to invest the time and effort into reading ‘Helliconia Spring’ and its sequels. All others can pass on this title. 

Captain Sternn

Captain Sternn
by Berni Wrightson
from Heavy Metal magazine, June 1980

One of the best comics to appear in the early issues of Heavy Metal magazine was 'Captain Sternn: Featuring Hanover Fiste', by Berni Wrightson, that appeared in the June, 1980 issue. its eight pages combine brilliant artwork with an offbeat plot that keeps the reader guessing till the very last panel.

Captain Sternn is - outwardly- the epitome of the clean-cut, morally upright hero, but as the story unfolds the satiric humor underlying his depiction gradually is revealed. 

The artwork has a dynamic quality that I've yet to see equalled in any of the comics I have read in the 36 years since the strip first was published. 

Here it is: Berni Wrightson's 'Captain Sternn'.

Freejack issue 3

Freejack
Official movie adaptation
Issue 3, June 1992
Chuck Dixon and Clint McElroy (writers), Ernie Stiner (pencils), Tony De Zuniga (inks)
NOW Comics