J. Oliver Dancoine’s Charles Vess: From The 1970’s to 1996

Charles Vess is one of the favourite artists among the staff here and he’s certainly has a distinctive style that’s shown up on many covers of books you’ve seen over the years. I found this chapbook while looking to see what what we had in the Estate Library on him and his art.

Other than Drawing Down the Moon which is the quintessential book on him, there’s very little that’s been done on him. Indeed I think there’s only been three such works in the past twenty years. It reminds of the material done for various genre writers such as Roger Zelazny. Even knowing such a work exists is even difficult as there was no internet to spread word of their existence. What little knowledge that was spread by word of mouth and little more.

Though slightly less than a hundred pages, it packs in a lot of material including a nice introduction by Dancoine on why he did this chapbook. This is followed by a third page biography of Vess. It’s a rather nice piece of writing. And I believe it’s the only detailed look at him and his art that I,now of.

The next section is definitely aimed at collectors as it’s an exhaustive listing of where his art has been published. You’ll no doubt notice that he did a lot of work for Marvel Comics and a fair amount for vertigo with a smattering for DC.

This is followed by a listing of posters he’d done, a. Miscellany of offbeat projects he’s been involved in, Awards he’d won, Exhibitions he’d been part of, and most interesting to me, a look at the creative process Vess does.

There’s even an advert for Vess’ The Book of Ballads and Sagas.

(j. Oliver Dancoine, 1997)

Cat Eldridge

I'm the publisher of Green Man Review. I do the Birthdays and Media Anniversary write-ups for Mike Glyer’s file770.com, the foremost SFF fandom site.

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