BWS and REH

Since Barry Windsor-Smith was absent from the previous post (or there in spirit via the pages of The Studio) I thought I’d post a few of his prints from the mid-70s. As I said in the Snaps piece, Smith and co. set up The Studio in order to concentrate on art that was creator-owned and free of the constraints they were forced to work under in the comics field. This didn’t mean that they completely abandoned the subjects which had made them popular artists. Barry Smith’s work for his own Gorblimey Press oscillated between pastiches of the 19th-century artists he admired—mainly Alphonse Mucha and the Pre-Raphaelites—and characters from the stories of Robert E. Howard, Conan in particular. Solomon Kane (1975). Smith’s work with Roy Thomas on the first run of Marvel’s Conan comics had given him access to a large audience of comic readers. Not all of these would have wanted to buy (or been able to afford) the Gorblimey Press run of signed and numbered prints but it made sense for Smith to…