Uncover the First Horror & Fantasy Journal, Der Orchideengarten, and Its Weird Art work (1919-1921)

From the 18th cen­tu­ry onward, the gen­res of Goth­ic hor­ror and fan­ta­sy have flour­ished, and with them the sen­su­al­ly vis­cer­al photos now com­mon­place in movie, TV, and com­ic books. These gen­res per­haps reached their aes­thet­ic peak within the nineteenth cen­tu­ry with writ­ers like Edgar Allan Poe and illus­tra­tors like Gus­tave Dore. But it surely was within the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry {that a} extra pop­ulist sub­style tru­ly got here into its personal: “bizarre fic­tion,” a time period H.P. Love­craft used to explain the pulpy model of tremendous­nat­ur­al hor­ror cod­i­fied within the pages of Amer­i­can fan­ta­sy and hor­ror magazine­a­zine Weird Tales—first pub­lished in 1923. (And nonetheless going robust!)

A pre­cur­sor to EC Comics’ many lurid titles, Bizarre Tales is usually con­sid­ered the defin­i­tive ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry venue for bizarre fic­tion and illus­tra­tion.

However we’d like solely look again just a few years and to anoth­er con­ti­nent to search out an ear­li­er pub­li­ca­tion, serv­ing Ger­man-speak­ing followers—Der Orchideen­garten (“The Gar­den of Orchids”), the very first hor­ror and fan­ta­sy magazine­a­zine, which ran 51 points from Jan­u­ary 1919 to Novem­ber 1921.

The magazine­a­zine fea­tured work from its edi­tors Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibul­ka, from wager­ter-known con­tem­po­raries like H.G. Wells and Karel Capek, and from fore­fa­thers like Dick­ens, Pushkin, Man de Mau­pas­sant, Poe, Voltaire, Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and oth­ers. “Though two problems with Der Orchideen­garten had been devot­ed to detec­tive sto­ries,” writes 50 Watts, “and one to erot­ic sto­ries about cuck­olds, it was a gen­uine fan­ta­sy magazine­a­zine.” And it was additionally a gallery of weird and unusu­al artwork­work.

50 Watts quotes from Franz Rottensteiner’s descrip­tion of the journal’s artwork, which ranged “from rep­re­sen­ta­tions of medieval wooden­cuts to the work of mas­ters of the macabre resembling Gus­tave Dore or Tony Johan­not, to con­tem­po­rary Ger­man artists like Rolf von Hoer­schel­mann, Otto Lenneko­gel, Karl Rit­ter, Hein­wealthy Kley, or Alfred Kubin.” These artists cre­at­ed the cov­ers and illus­tra­tions you see right here, and plenty of extra you may see at 50 Watts, the black sun, and John Coulthart’s {feuil­leton}.

“What strikes me about these black-and-white draw­ings,” just like the dense, fren­zied pen-and-ink scene above, Coulthart com­ments, “is how dif­fer­ent they’re in tone to the pulp magazine­a­zines which fol­lowed brief­ly after in Amer­i­ca and else­the place. They’re without delay way more grownup and fre­quent­ly extra orig­i­nal than the Goth­ic clichés which padded out Bizarre Tales and fewer­er titles for a few years.” Certainly, although the for­mat could also be sim­i­lar to its suc­ces­sors, Der Orchideen­garten’s cov­ers present the influ­ence of Sur­re­al­ism, “some are nearly Expres­sion­ist in fashion,” and lots of the illus­tra­tions present “a dis­tinct Goya influ­ence.”

Pop­u­lar fan­ta­sy and hor­ror illus­tra­tion has typically leaned extra towards the soft-porn of sev­en­ties air­brushed vans, pulp-nov­el cov­ers, or the gris­ly kitsch of the comics. Rot­ten­stein­er writes in his 1978 Fan­ta­sy Book that this “large-for­mat magazine­a­zine… should positive­ly rank as some of the beau­ti­ful fan­ta­sy magazine­a­zines ever pub­lished.” It’s exhausting to argue with that assess­ment. View, learn (in Ger­man), and down­load orig­i­nal scans of the magazine’s first sev­er­al issues over on this Prince­ton site.

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up appeared on our website in 2016.

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