The Alchemist of the Sigils and Shadowless: Esoterica and the Future of Non-Euclidean Horror

Transmission 383: Interview with John Coulthart

John Coulthart occupies a singular place in contemporary visual culture, an artist, designer, illustrator, writer and cultural archaeologist whose work explores the borderlands between literature, symbolism, horror, surrealism, and graphic design. A lot of his work sits at the intersection of weird fiction, science fiction, non-fiction, occult , steampunk aesthetics, cultural archaeology, esoterica,  and his visual philosophy combines his drawing with collage, typography, with his own unique adaptation. Well known for his intricate experimentation, and haunting visual interpretations of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, he has spent decades constructing a visual language that feels at once scholarly, dreamlike, and unsettlingly alien. He is one of the most distinctive visual voices in contemporary counter-culture, with his intricate, chameleonic style that shifts effortlessly from the dense, razor-sharp lines of high-modernist comic art to the lush, heavily textured layouts of psychedelic and occult book design.

He first gained prominence in the late 1980s and 90s through his groundbreaking, highly controversial collaborations with Savoy Books, including the definitive graphic adaptations and the dizzying, transgressive masterpiece Lord Horror: Reverbstorm. As a graphic designer, his distinct aesthetic has graced CD, album covers for legendary musical acts ranging from Hawkwind to Cradle of Filth, as well as editorial illustration, comics, calendars, book designs for a pantheon of visionary authors including Alan Moore, Angela Carter, and Michael Moorcock. Notably, Coulthart served as the visual architect and illustrator for Alan Moore (read our interview with Alan Moore) and Steve Moore’s monumental, decades-in-the-making grimoire, The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. His long-running online journal Feuilleton has become an essential archive of artists, strange histories, and the evolution of the Weird imagination. Drawing equally from fin-de-siècle illustration, occult diagrams, modernist design, and cosmic horror, he creates images that resemble fragments from lost libraries or evidence recovered from parallel worlds. 

He works as an artist and book designer for several publishers, such as Tachyon in the US and Savoy Books in the UK. In 2005, he received a nomination for the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist. He won the 2012 World Fantasy Awards for Best Artist. Whether designing a book cover, assembling a collage, or resurrecting neglected visual traditions, John Coulthart approaches art as a visual archaeologist, uncovering hidden correspondences between image, text, myth, and memory, as a tireless explorer of “Idea Space,” transforming the strange, the subversively beautiful, and the outright cosmic into tangible art.

Official site | Feuilleton | Bluesky | Behance

John Coulthart is widely celebrated for his definitive Lovecraft graphic adaptations like “The Haunter of the Dark”.

Lovecraft wrote about “non-Euclidean geometry” and monsters that defy human visual perception. As an artist and illustrator, how do you approach drawing something that is explicitly described as “indescribable” without reducing its cosmic terror to a mere monster-movie trope? Where do you get your inspiration?

This is a question that nags at me since I keep getting asked to illustrate either stories by Lovecraft himself or by people working their own variations on the Cthulhu Mythos. I still don’t feel I’ve addressed the issue adequately although a few pieces of mine have attempted to go beyond mere monster illustration. I think you have to try and appreciate what Lovecraft was grasping for: a sense of the alien which is so far outside our expectations that perception and sanity collapses when confronted with it. It also helps to acquaint yourself with some of the physical concepts I was interested in. You can’t depict non-Euclidean geometry, for example, if you don’t know what the term refers to. I try to bear in mind the inherent weirdness of speculative physics, and also the ways in which 20th-century art deviates from general illustration, not just the obvious examples like Surrealism but earlier developments such as Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, etc. In 2007 I made a pencil drawing, “Cubist Cthulhu”, which was a gesture towards a form of representation that doesn’t reduce extraterrestrial entities to lumbering kaiju. The territory suggested by that drawing remains largely unexplored.

Many artists illustrate monsters; your artwork often illustrates systems of thought, occult diagrams, impossible cosmologies, and symbolic architectures. What attracts you more to ideas than to creatures?

It’s never easy to say what attracts you to one thing over another, your interests are always in the background informing your work as an artist. I like playing with ideas, and I enjoy the writings of people who do the same. Jorge Luis Borges has long been a favourite writer, and it’s interesting to see how he approaches Lovecraft and the monstrous in his own Lovecraftian story “There are more things”. Any occult symbolism in my illustration is usually there because it complements the material, I try to avoid using these things gratuitously. My mother had a small collection of occult books that prompted my interest in the subject from an early age. I’ve always enjoyed the visual aspect of the occult, the distillation of metaphysical concepts into sigils or icons. As for architecture, this has been another abiding interest, and it’s one of many things that made me favour Lovecraft’s writings over those of his contemporaries. Architecture is an important and recurrent feature of Lovecraft’s major stories, even the minor ones include descriptions of buildings. Alan Moore reaffirmed this in Providence by having each issue of the series show a different building as the cover illustration.

Curated since 2006, feuilleton has become an essential cultural archive, threading together forgotten corners of art history, architecture, weird fiction, and the European avant-garde. 

Much contemporary science fiction, occult, and horror imagery feels optimized for instant recognition. Your compositions frequently balance precision with delirium. Has modern visual culture become too legible? Do you think visual art can express “the Weird” more effectively than prose because it can remain unresolved and ambiguous?

I’d say it’s more a case of contemporary genre imagery being optimised for commerce: the exploitative hand of capitalism falls upon everything in the cultural sphere. Star Wars accelerated this process when it became apparent that you could make a fortune by selling spin-off goods. The other development has been the way that so-called geek culture evolved in the 1990s from a niche interest to a global business whose audience wasn’t limited to small children or teenage boys. The entertainment corporations have become adept at manipulating nostalgia so they now aim their wares at the widest possible audience, including grandparents and parents along with the teens and kids.

As for the weird, I think that prose is still the most effective delivery system for weird fiction, although film can certainly be very effective when it’s used by someone like Kiyoshi Kurosawa or David Lynch. Visual art is never as subtle as words can be, the subject of a picture is always right there in front of you. Words operate in a different way, they’re the signifiers of things that exist beyond themselves, they conjure the world of the story during the process of reading. Weirdness in fiction thrives on that conjuring, working with the unstated as well as the explicit; the reader’s imagination fills the gaps. Lovecraft in his long essay on supernatural literature asserts that atmosphere is a prime element of the weird tale, and atmosphere is another conjured element, a product of the accumulation of detail and circumstance. Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” is a good example of this. The story evokes a sense of strangeness and malevolence which can’t really be depicted visually, not in a way that would work as effectively as the story itself.

His work bridges the worlds of literary cosmic horror, avant-garde music, and esoteric history.

You have a lifelong creative relationship with Alan Moore and have illustrated multiple works with him. How did he influence the way you physically construct layouts and book covers? Can you share an anecdote about a collaborative creative process that produced unexpected and surprising results?

I don’t think Alan has influenced any of my approach to book design or cover design but I find his philosophical attitude very appealing, especially his insistence that art is magic. I started to think about this more seriously after some long conversations we had in the 1990s.

The only things that are surprising about any of the projects we’ve worked on have been odd coincidences that continued to surface over the years. Most of these are too slight to be worth recounting but in the mid-90s there was a striking one that occurred when we were working on a project (subsequently cancelled) about Aleister Crowley. Part of the brief required me to draw a room infested with insects, and it was while doing this that my bathroom was inundated for an afternoon with honey bees. I think a new colony had just hatched somewhere and got into the room through a crack in the wall. I wouldn’t say the Crowley project prompted the invasion but it certainly seemed that way at the time.

In 1982, he created his first image for the Hawkwind album Church of Hawkwind. Since then, Jon Hassell, Steven Severin, Cradle of Filth, Melechesh, and several more artists have used his designs and images for vinyl covers, CDs, and DVD packaging.

Working on “The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic” required translating decades of Alan Moore and Steve Moore’s dense, practical, and philosophical ideas about magic into a physical, visual artifact. What were some of the most challenging abstract concepts you had to render as a concrete graphic layout?

I didn’t find any of the occult material difficult to deal with since it was all very familiar, and the descriptions of the required artwork were very clear. One reason I’ve been involved with the Moon and Serpent productions is because of my long-standing interest in occult matters. The biggest challenge with the book was getting all the material into a presentable shape. I was given a folder filled with old Word documents, some of which were unfinished drafts, together with a table of contents that was out of date as a result of decisions to drop parts of the book as it had been planned originally. I was having to work with all this as a designer, typesetter and illustrator which is uncommon for a book of such size and complexity. I didn’t mind having to juggle so many tasks but doing so meant that it took me about three years to get everything finished.

“Reverbstorm” is a dizzying vortex of high Modernism, Joycean prose, and raw, transgressive comic art. Looking back on that era of razor-sharp drawing, do you think the contemporary landscape of underground art has lost some of its appetite for genuinely dangerous, challenging transgression, or has that energy simply moved elsewhere?

That’s hard to say, I don’t see much underground art today, and the whole concept of “underground” doesn’t really apply to contemporary culture. The underground up to the end of the 1990s was an identifiable counter-culture exploring material you wouldn’t get from mainstream or popular outlets. Not just the content that wouldn’t be allowed on TV, for example, but avant-garde presentation techniques that were regarded as too challenging or uncommercial. The divisions between mainstream and underground collapsed once the internet started to flatten the cultural landscape.

As a comic book artist in the 1990s, he collaborated with David Britton to develop the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm for Savoy Books. He also earned the questionable distinction of having a previous Savoy title, Hard Core Horror 5, ruled obscene by a British court.

Transgression is a different issue since it’s always a contingent element, acting in opposition to the norms of time or place. Tastes and taboos change over time, which means that transgressive culture has to change accordingly otherwise it ceases to be transgressive. Sexuality and sexual material was the big transgressive frontier for most of the 20th century which it obviously isn’t today, at least where adult activity is concerned. There are still taboos, of course; these things never go away, they migrate from one area to another. Transgression per se has never interested me very much, in part because it’s very easy to achieve. You identify something that upsets people then shove that in their faces. We have a name for this activity–trolling–and artists can be trolls as much as anyone else.

Reverbstorm was transgressive in some ways but this was never the sole intention behind the series. We wanted to create something that we didn’t see anyone else doing in comics at that time, a series that was adult in technique as well as content; a comic about Modernism that was itself a Modernist artefact, which played with a wide range of art and literary references while building a nightmare landscape out of the fascist impulses of the early 20th century. For my part the series was an attempt to treat the comics medium the way that literature had been treated by novels like Les Chants de Maldoror and Naked Lunch, creating something that was unrestrained and excessive while operating on a different level to the unrestrained and excessive undergrounds of the 1970s. And we wanted to produce something that would only work on paper and as a comic strip, not something that looked and read like a hand-drawn feature film. The transgressive aspects were prominent mainly because it was unusual to be doing all this in the comics medium.

Rapid Eye, Critical Vision, EsoTerra, CNN.com, Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, and the Channel 4 television series Banned in the UK have all featured John’s

When you are designing a cover for a band or a book, are you trying to visually replicate the frequency and texture of the sound itself, or the sound as it reaches your mind? How does visualizing words versus a soundscape dictate lines and nuances differently?

Most of the album covers I’ve worked on have been produced before I heard a note of the music, although I was always aware of what the music would sound like in a general sense. The majority of the covers have been dictated by the musicians who often have a very precise idea of what they want, at least for the front cover. Books are different since the cover tends to be commissioned after the book has been accepted for publication which means there’s often a manuscript that you can read beforehand. The fundamental difference between the two forms would be that albums don’t always have an identifiable theme, you’re often required to work with symbols or abstract elements. Novels are more open to direct illustration, in which case you’re usually looking for a way to summarise the story (or stories) in a single picture or design.

Since 2006, you have meticulously maintained Feuilleton, creating a massive, interconnected digital museum of art history, the occult, and aesthetics. Over these two decades, you have threaded together elements of art history, psychedelia, architecture, and weird fiction. How has this act of seeking out and archiving art subtly rewired your own aesthetic intuition as a creator?

I don’t know if I’ve rewired anything but writing a blog continuously for over twenty years has made me more aware of fleeting interests, small obsessions and so on. I call it a journal because that’s really what it is, an account of things I happen to be noticing, or films watched and books read, odd connections, something I’ve discovered. When you’re having to explain something to a reader the process makes you think more deeply about the things you enjoy. It also hones your writing to some degree. There’s always a danger that discussing this activity makes it sound like some horrible productivity tool, which was never my intention. But being an artist in any medium means living with your senses primed to notice things that may be useful in a new piece of work. Over the past twenty years there’s been a continual to and fro between the blog and projects I’ve been working on, chance discoveries which feed into a design or an illustration. And I’ve found it very useful to have my own online bookmarking system. It’s a corrective to the endless scroll of social media where you’re shown something which promptly disappears from sight; and to the present degradation of the search environment by Google and others, where corporations want to guide you to the things that generate their ad revenue. I said there wasn’t much of an underground culture today, but this use of the internet–a use which is self-generated, self-supported, independent from corporate systems–feels increasingly like an underground activity.

In an era where algorithmic feeds dictate visual curation for most people, Feuilleton remains an intensely human, idiosyncratic archive. How important is the role of the human tastemaker versus the machine algorithm in keeping obscure culture alive and breathing?

It’s vital because machines don’t know what anything is. They can form patterns with their vast oceans of data but the algorithms have no knowledge of the world, they’re not feeling, thinking, embodied beings. They’re also tailored to benefit the people who wrote them, to guide you to things that generate yet more money for people who already have too much of the stuff. Trust has always been an important feature of human affairs, it affects everything from our emotional entanglements to whether or not two countries will go to war with each other. We’re living through a time where we’re being asked to offer our trust to artificial systems which prove themselves inherently untrustworthy every minute of the day. I do a lot of image searching, often looking to identify the source of a particular image or design, and I’ve been fascinated by the confident manner in which Google’s image search delivers its AI summary when the information its giving you is absolutely incorrect. This doesn’t happen occasionally, it happens a lot, and you can even play with it by showing it something that doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet (ie: something you’ve just made yourself) to see what erroneous attribution it invents.

You have praised the flexibility of digital tools for allowing you to combine photo-sourcing with vector illustration. However, we are currently living through a crisis regarding generative AI imagery trained on artists’ work. As a digital pioneer, how do you view the ethics and future of this shift?

This is a big subject, and one I try to avoid getting into because the critics who are responding to the AI onslaught have cleared a lot of ground already. (Ted Chiang is good. Read Ted Chiang.) I’ve been on the receiving end of AI attention via the Midjourney court case which revealed a huge list of artists whose work was submitted to Midjourney’s systems. My name was on that list but I doubt any AI system can successfully offer something “in the style of John Coulthart” because I don’t have an identifiable art style. The styles I use vary according to the demands of the work at hand.

We’re still waiting for all these developments to settle down so it’s foolish to try and prognosticate too much but it’s obvious that much of the argument in favour of AI art has been lost. The term “slop” became widespread at such a speed that it’s going to be difficult for the slop merchants to popularise their products in any other way, although I’m sure they’ll continue to make the attempt. I also think getting anyone to respect AI art will be very difficult. Respect, as the saying goes, has to be earned. We respect the riders in the Tour de France, for example, because they push their bodies to extremes when they’re riding over the Pyrénées. We don’t respect anyone who rides the same route on a motorbike.

On a more abstract level it’s been interesting seeing how quickly so much AI art has achieved a kind of mannerist sameness, a digital mulch that makes so much of the stuff look as though it’s extruded from the same pipe. “Slop” is very apt in this context. But it’s never sloppy slop, which is another problem for the slop merchants. You see the same veneer of perfection applied to everything at all times–the lighting is always accurate, the shadows always fall in exactly the right place; any mistakes are those a human being wouldn’t make, like giving someone too many hands. The only human art that features absolutely flawless light and shade is the kind that’s intentionally photo-realistic, and flawless photo-realism is a very minor pursuit in the art world. When you’re painting or drawing you’re producing a general approximation of how and where the light will fall in a picture. You may even omit the shadows altogether, or have one area of the picture where, for the sake of the composition, the shadows have been removed or unnaturally subdued. This is what we mean when we talk about “artistic license”. The slop machines don’t know about this because they don’t know what art is, and neither, it seems, do the engineers who program them. They’re asking people to accept the replacement of boundless human creativity with the world’s most expensive clip-art generator.

I read that your future creative projects include a series of novels, the first of which is entitled Axiom. Can you tell us more about this project? Have you been guarding your internal worldbuilding and visual narrative, waiting to create a universe entirely out of your own writing and visual art?

Ah, yes, Axiom… This refers to two things, the name of the project itself, which covers a handful of self-contained but interrelated projects in different media; and the title of a novel which I wrote from 2001 to 2007. Axiom is also the name of the imaginary city that’s the focus of the project as a whole, a sprawling place like an early 20th-century European city which I designed as a stage for original work of my own. The setting was tailored so it could support a range of fictional explorations, from straightforward realism to outright fantasy or cosmic horror. To date the project as a whole comprises two novels, a couple of shorter pieces of fiction, three experiments in sequential pictorial storytelling, and a few one-off illustrations. None of this is being deliberately held back, it’s more a case of some parts of the project being unfinished while the two novels are in unpublished limbo.

Axiom (the novel) is 100,000 words that introduce the city setting via four connected narratives with a variety of different characters, most of whom don’t know each other and never meet. Writing a novel wasn’t an unprecedented excursion into a new medium, I’d spent a lot of time in my teens and twenties writing fiction, including two earlier attempts at novels. After a decade spent working on Reverbstorm and other collaborations and commissions I felt it was time to create something more personal. I secured an agent for the novel almost immediately but finding a publisher has proved more difficult. It’s hard to say why people don’t want it, you seldom get feedback in rejections, although a couple of publishers said the sexual content was off-putting. I think more of a problem is that the four connected narratives are generic pieces–there are fantastic events in all of them–but the novel isn’t constructed in the usual generic manner. Structurally I was thinking of things like Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s Four Quartets or Kieslowski’s films, with each section of the novel following a careful symbolic scheme. This sounds very grand but I wasn’t trying to do something on a par with Ulysses, it was more a case of looking for a structure that wasn’t simply Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on. The sections are connected through the structure and various thematic cues, not through character; the main character is the city itself. In other words, the book is pitched midway between fantasy fiction on the one hand, and literary fiction on the other, with a result that it seems to be too literary (for want of a better term) for genre publishers, and too generic for those smaller publishers who deal with a lot of opaque, unorthodox or experimental writing. That’s my guess, anyway. My agent spent a lot of time trying to sell the book but could never say what people didn’t like about it.

The second novel, Vitriol, is set twenty years before the first, and features a few of the same characters, only this time it has a single story to tell. It’s a long book, 217,000 words, that I spent ten years writing, and it’s one of the most ambitious things I’ve attempted in any medium. The story explores the nature of a catastrophe that’s only alluded to in the first novel, a city-wide cataclysm involving warring alchemists that’s set against a psychedelic revolution. I wanted to try something on a broader canvas, an incident-rich collision of cosmic horror, psychedelia and sword and sorcery. The structure this time is a seven-part affair that’s too complicated to go into here; the book also has a gay brothel as one of its central locations so there’s a lot of gay sex. Once again, no publishers have shown any interest but Gollancz did send a nice response saying they were impressed with the writing but it wasn’t commercial enough for them. If you’re hoping a publisher might spend money printing and promoting your book then you have to expect this reaction, they’re not charities. But this leaves me with the problem of a pair of “uncommercial” novels that I don’t really want to dilute in order to satisfy the elusive demands of the marketplace. Having two books I spent years working on floating around in limbo goes against all my instincts as an artist but that’s how things stand at the moment.

The Axiom project is still ongoing but it’s been sidetracked by recent work on a new edition of my collection of Lovecraft-derived comic strips and illustrations. After I finished writing the second novel I wrote a couple of shorter pieces but decided I wanted a change from written fiction. The result was a series of short experiments that combine words and images in a complementary manner. Not comic strips, although they are sequential narratives. The first two attempts at this were proof-of-concept things that could do with being revised, but I was pleased with the third one, “The Night Tram”, which is a wordless account of a nocturnal tram journey through the streets of Axiom and some of the regions outside the city. I’d started work on a fourth story in the series but the Lovecraft book intervened. Once I’ve got the tentacled horrors out of the way I’ll be looking at this again.

Photo and illustration courtesy of © John Coulthart

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.