Avery Manor: The Tour (Part One - The Art)

Some of the visitors to this blog will be aware of most of the 'sights' on this tour of my humble abode. But as I've noticed that there has been a fair bit of traffic from elsewhere (from Japan, Russia and the US), I thought I'd take you visitors on a whistle-stop tour of my home and its admittedly deeply geeky contents.

So welcome, gentle viewer. And try not to touch anything...

The Art...

I carried this framed print all the way from Paris, from a simply incredible comic book/cd/dvd store that escapes my memory at the moment. I've long been an admirer of European comic art and Blacksad is one of the most popular and easily obtainable of the great Bande Dessinées.

Blacksad, by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido is film noir populated by anthropomorphized animals. The art by Guarnido is beautiful detailed watercolour and once I saw this, I had to part with some euros and carry it back across the pond to live on the wall above my TV.

Check out this Blacksad site for some more examples of this beautiful comic art.

http://www.blacksadmania.com/
A couple of German reproduction prints of Metropolis and Cabaret. Both obtained from one of my favourite stores in London. VinMag is located in the depths of Soho, and is full of movie memorabilia - T-Shirts, posters, old magazines and books and a whole lot more besides. It's a guarantee that I'm going to part with some cash whenever I step over VinMag's threshold...

http://www.vinmag.com/

This print was bought from the US off ebay. Various Golden and Silver Age comic book artists were commissioned to produce new art for a very expensive portfolio. Luckily some of these portfolios have since been split up and the prints sold separately. Variations On A Theme, by Jerry Robinson is one of my favourites. Robinson was responsible for co-creating The Joker, and this print is a riff on one of those classic Golden Age Batman covers. It's also signed and numbered by the great man himself.

Following my recent conversion to all things Audrey Hepburn, I'd had my eye on this huge canvas of

Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not only is it one of those iconic movie images, it's also painted by Robert McGuiness(check out my post on him in my Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part One).

Amanda bought it for me as an early Valentine's Day gift, and now sits at the back of the living room beside my bookshelves.

I obtained these two prints from Paris too. Sky Doll is a series of comic books by Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa. It's a slickly produced bit of adult SF about religion, mass media and life-like androids. The art for Sky Doll is all over Parisian comic book stores, and I fell in love with it while there. It's got a slight manga quality, but with a 60's/70's psychedelia element to it. I picked up the translations re-printed in Heavy Metal magazine, but now they're also available from Marvel.

http://skydoll.lesite.free.fr/