(Fantasy Art & Philosophy)
LINK B OF THE WEBSITE kennethsmith.com
. . .with links to (A) INDEX PAGE, (C) MEMNON PRESS, (D) PHANTASMAGORIA PUBLICATIONS, (E) KENNETH SMITH BOOKS, & (F) KENNETH SMITH ART.
KENNETH SMITH or
MEMNON PRESS or PHANTASMAGORIA PUBL.
PO BOX 381551 / DUNCANVILLE TX 75138-1551
PHONE (972) 780-0384 OR EMAIL kensmith@texas.net
LINK B: BIOGRAPHY & PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
Greetings, cybergeeks and webgawkers. The world is almost getting strange enough to satisfy those of us nursed to consciousness on SF, fantasy and the weirder philosophers. What will the banal businessmind do in our brained new world when there are no enclaves of ordinariness left? (What is the sound of the other shoe not yet dropped?) This website may not be the most exotic or flamboyant ever posted, but for certain there won't be another like it. . . .
Born in 1943 in Austin, TX, I graduated in 1962 from SF Austin High and from UT in 1966, marrying Angela King, my high school sweetheart, the next day. Kinky Friedman (the mystery novelist and country-western satirist who gave us "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore" and "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed") was a high school classmate, as was the pianist and conductor David Montgomery, and the horror-film art director Bob Burns (of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Howling and Re-Animator). I was at UT when Jaxon put out the first underground comic GOD NOSE and Shelton was drawing WONDER WART-HOG for THE TEXAS RANGER. As an undergraduate I studied with William Arrowsmith, Roger Shattuck, John Findlay, John Silber and others. I entered graduate school at UT as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Considered a natural teacher and an instinctive philosopher, I was accepted for graduate school at Yale in 1967, where I studied with Paul Weiss, Stephen Toulmin, and Kenley Dove, getting my Ph.D. there in 1972 after teaching my first year at LSU-Baton Rouge.
COMICS CULTURE in the late 1960's spawned fanzines of diverse contents and production-values. An EC fan and a Pogo enthusiast, I contributed copiously to Spa Fon, Squa Tront, Witzend, Reality, Heritage, Anomaly, Phase One, etc. while in graduate school. Then Frank Frazetta and Wally Wood encouraged me at Seuling's NY Comics Cons to get into the fantasy cover market. I was pleased to get to know these two great talents, and also Al Williamson, Burne Hogarth, Gil Kane, and others in comics and science-fantasy. I did produce cover art for Lancer, Ace, Creepy and Eerie as well.
SELF-PUBLISHING: As much as art directors, aficionados or other collectors have enjoyed my occasional published work over the years, it was painfully obvious that if I wanted to get my best, most searching work into print, I would have to publish it myself. In modern culture commercializability is not necessarily a criterion of quality. It is imperative that creative and incisive intelligence get direct access to some kind of public, no matter how meager--access uncontrolled by mediocritizers or panderers. I began my anomalous para-professional career in self-publication by advertising in 1970 in the fledgling Comic Buyer's Guide a portfolio of my fantasy art, to fund my own artzine.
Then in summer 1971, issue # 1 of my PHANTASMAGORIA appeared, the first solo creator-published, professional quality zine. It was a fable from the Age of Reptiles, a decade prior to Stout's Dinosaurs, two decades before Gurney's Dinotopia. My book-in-a-magazine-format--an illustrated fable for adults rather than a comic, and an odd offspring of Aesop, Hegel and Pogo--was very well received within the comics culture of that time; but more important to me, I had found a gestalt for my talents and interests, a pursuit commanding the consummate focus of my abilities. I had delivered myself of a book, a symphony of words and pictures: a syncretion of left and right hemispheres. I still can't get blase about the thrill of synthesis, the satori of joining the aspects of a book together. A substantial book is a way of seeing the world made visible, a spiritual organism or symphonic intelligence and a far more rational creature than most humans.
MY SO-CALLED CAREER: My interests in philosophy and in fantasy art and story are not as disjointed as may seem: my comprehensive concerns have always been about the diversity of perspectives and the enclosing culture of epochs, the peculiar color, flavor and style of thinking that situtates consciousness in an historical-cultural nest of presuppositions. I was always attracted to difficult philosophers like Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Arendt (and later Kafka) because their grasp on the peculiarities of modern culture was the most concrete and illuminating. I posed a topic in the odd-numbered issues of PHANTASMAGORIA--the hypothetical or mythical worldviews specific to the dominant species during the Great Ages of Evolution--to portray how life and thinking might have gone otherwise for us. . .indeed might actually be otherwise than we commonly suppose.
During the 12 years I taught in the Third-World nation of Louisiana, I produced over 20 portfolios and another 4 issues of PHANTASMAGORIA: issue 2 presented a cover and story retrieved from CREEPY and a story reclaimed from WITZEND; #3 a fable from the Age of Fish; #4 a dream-fantasy of farflung worlds; and #5--two decades before ANTZ and A BUG'S LIFE--a fable from the Age of Insects. During the 1970's my work was ubiquitous at comics conventions from New York to Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Diego. (See the PHANTASMAGORIA link for the art.)
MY SECOND SO-CALLED CAREER: The slave-mill of academia took its toll and I set aside the avocation of self-publishing in the late '70's. My disillusionment with the crass politics of the wretched academic profession made me move to Dallas in 1983, where I plied my talents as a commercial artist on print campaigns for American Airlines, Colter's, Baylor Hospital, etc. I produced stories and art for HEAVY METAL from 1978-90, illustrated the opening of Bradbury's DINOSAUR TALES and the children's books THE BAT FAMILY and THE REBUS BEARS. I had my art featured in the fantasy anthology SORCERERS and had a cover-painting selected for inclusion in SPECTRUM I. In 1990 Fantagraphics published PHANTASMAGORIA II:1, and Eros Comix issued SUCCUBUS in 1991. I felt as many others did that the quality of my fantasy paintings surged upward from 1978 on. But burned too often by some weasel-agents and publishers, I withdrew to work in private.
THE DELUGE OF WRITING: In the late 1980's I wrote a column on philosophy and modern culture, DRAMAS OF THE MIND, for THE COMICS JOURNAL, and returned to teaching part- and full-time from 1990 to '95. But universities are no more healthy and enabling now than they were 20 years ago. I continue to extend my insights into the problems and shape of modern culture--i.e. what it deters its inmates from seeing and understanding about itself--as I read and write more freely now, away from the cloying miasma of academia. In 1995 I rethought how I was grasping and expressing the issues I wanted to sensitize readers to, and determined to teach myself how to produce the sort of evocative parables and paradoxes I had learned so much from in Kierkegaard, Kafka, Nietzsche, Wilde, and other writers. I began generating the material out of which I would form OTHERWISE, WEBS, MINOTAUR, and other books forthcoming. I published OTHERWISE as the first offering from my new enterprise, Memnon Press, a very different kind of writing and certainly a book meant to work the basal categories of the reader's mind over. It gathers a galaxy of philosophical anecdotes, myths, aphorisms, and dialogues on existential issues that desiccated modern philosophy has allowed to lapse.
In early 1999 THE COMICS JOURNAL began running my most ambitious composition in the philosophy of civilization, MILLENNIA IN MICROCOSM, which is hopefully to be published by the end of the year or so by Memnon. (See the MEMNON PRESS link, where anyone with a taste for Nietzsche, Kafka, Shaw, Wilde, or other contrarians can peruse selections from my published and projected Memnon books. It's writing meant for very gradual digestion, not "reading" but pondering.)
I continue to write, draw, paint (fabulous unseen work) and publish. I hope to revive PHANTASMAGORIA--I have now announced the publication of issue seven for the year 2000 Comic Con International in San Diego--and to extend my mail-order business in collectible fantasy-art and vintage illustration books (see the KENNETH SMITH BOOKS link). I've always been more diversified than I could advertise by conventional means. My imagination ranges across many genres and media (see also the KENNETH SMITH ART link). The flexibility of a website is the very milieu I needed, considering the mass of delectable books I've gathered over the years and the wealth of art I've produced. I have been filling mail orders since 1970 and dealing in illustrated and fantasy art books since the early '80's. I've been exhibiting my choice findings at the San Diego Comic Con since 1990. Anthony Smith, Bud Plant, Jim Vadeboncoeur, Bob Beerbohm and others have been friends of mine in the art-book and comics trade for 30 years or so.
THE CLAN: Fans who recall my exhibits may want to know that our kids are off on diverse careers. Devon our oldest is in sales at Dell Computers, Kristen is a doctoral candidate in flute at the Cincinnati Conservatory, and Toren our youngest heads the Computer Sciences lab/UT-Austin (tbone@cs.utexas.edu or tbone@plugandburn.com). My wife Angela researches pediatric cancer-pharmacology protocols.
KENNETH SMITH or MEMNON PRESS or PHANTASMAGORIA PUBL.
PO BOX 381551 / DUNCANVILLE TX 75138-1551
PHONE (972) 780-0384 OR EMAIL kensmith@texas.net
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