This is a very enjoyable project, a collection of some amazingly visual lobby cards produced in Mexico during the 1950s and 1960s to promote sci-fi, gangster, monster and horror movies. These were generally dubbed into Spanish and the local distributors produced their own publicity material using local illustrators and designers. The cards come from a collection in New York and my job is to curate the selection of images. As well as fascinating work I am also learning a lot about this era of movie making, much of which was done on shoe-string budgets.
As is often the way with books, the cover had to be roughed up fairly early doors to give social media and distributors something for publicity purposes. I felt early on that a montage was the way to go to try and convey as much as possible about the varied content and the work of the Mexican illustrators and designers.
A lot of the films were 18+ ratings when first released, and the X of X Certificate seemed a good motif. This dramatic version came off one of the lobby cards. I tried hard to get it to form the “X” of “Mexican” and indeed this worked to begin with, but as the montage progressed the X began obscuring important parts of the image, so reluctantly I let this idea go.
In the end there are about twelve different elements to the montage itself. It was important to touch on as many aspects of the films as practical, so there are sci-fi rockets, planets, monsters, bats, robotic apes, space vixens, mind experiments and those damsels in distress. And of course a superhero wrestler, something the Mexican film goers were especially fond of!
With all this going on it needed a nice clean sans serif typeface for the title to ride above the image and this is one I have used on a couple of other book projects so lends a little extra uniformity. My aim was to end up with a cover which would catch my eye on a book shelf and make me reach for my purse. There are also a couple of small elements which fans of the genre will recognise right away (the claw on the top right? War Of The Worlds!), these I hope help reinforce the idea that this is not one of those poorly rushed jobs which plague the sci-fi book market.
The downside of pushing this visual through early was that I did all the montage work fairly quickly using low-resolution jpegs (which was all I had). I finally found the stamina recently to try and recreate it to production level resolution.
This meant locating all eight of the lobby card scans from the hundreds now on file. If I had half a brain I would have named the sources within the artwork file – but of course I didn’t! Once found, I had to extract the sections I needed for the montage, cut round and prepare each element anew. It was mostly a case of being very careful this time.
The biggest image comes from a local lobby card for Carnival of Souls (above), which had just the right mix of ‘damsel in distress and spooky mind controlling villain’, plus a few glimpses of oriental architecture and circles which look like planets (I think they were meant to be lights).
The illustration had a blue background so I let this dictate the colour scheme overall. I stripped out the text, and filled in with a matching blue, then added an enlargement from the lobby card from another film, Black Sunday (above), as a new texture layer and blended this in, erasing any bits which overlapped the original image.
After this it was a case of bringing in the other elements, getting them in the correct layer order so they overlapped in the way I wanted, adding a bit of a contrast boost to aid the pulp illustration effect I was after. One original image I had used I still did not have in hi-res, but as it was important the the Mexican wrestler / superhero characters so beloved of their film industry was represented, I swopped it out for a livelier figure from a different film (he is to the left of the bat).
I remained happy with the fonts used on the visual, so contented myself with fine tuning these, adding a very thin outline to the letters and credits. Lastly the publisher’s name was moved up to the top as it was becoming lost where it was.
Once the lettering was in place, the montage needed a bit more tweaking to get all the elements into the right place behind the text. So for example the yellow rocket on the left (which was leaning on the first visual) fits nicely between the two words. At the end of the day this all hopefully gives enough visual clues to anyone seeing the cover online or in a book store, and if those clues trigger the right response, prompt people to investigate further. I know if I saw this on the shelf at Waterstones I’d be tempted to have a look (it won’t happen as Waterstones refuse to stock the publisher’s titles but you know what I mean!).
More about this title when it nears publication, but you can subscribe to the publisher’s site at Easy On The Eye Books to keep up to date.
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