Journey’s Use of SF in Album Art

These are just four examples I’ve found.  I am also intrigued by their continual usage of the

Egyptian scarab beetle, which on the website is described with:

“The one and all of Journey is the evolution that continues to take place with members coming and going,” Cain said. “The band has evolved similar to ways that the Egyptians used to think that the beetle would go up into heaven and take the souls into the afterlife and continue to have eternal happiness. Well, that beetle has brought us a lot of happiness.”

I find this an interesting connection with some of the ideas of Sun Ra, and it draws another connection between SF and older mythologies/religions with the idea of transcendence.

Journey’s music has few, if any, clear references to SF but more to some of the general ideas, including an idea of the “Grand Illusion” of social and cultural differences.

Regardless, it is some cool art.

Thomas Ott: Scratchboard Graphic Novels

I was looking into more scratchboard artwork with SF themes, and I ran across some images form Thomas Ott’s first length graphic novel.  Here is the description on Amazon:

A horrific graphic novel, without words.


Swiss horror master Thomas Ott returns with the first full-length graphic novel of his career. When clearing up the cell of a prisoner who has been sentenced to death and subsequently executed, a prison guard finds a small piece of paper with a combination of numbers on it.

On the spur of the moment, he puts it into his pocket.

As the guard lives a solitary, monotonous life, the numbers on the paper awake his curiosity. To find out their hidden meaning could add a new meaning to his life as well, so the guard stumbles into situations in which the number or part of it seem to achieve a certain importance and offer him hints and possible solutions. And the numbers signal a radical change in his luck. He gets to know a woman, falls in love with her, and one night, in a casino, he wins a huge amount of money when gambling on these numbers.

But the next morning, the woman and money have disappeared.

The man goes in search of the woman and the money. But from that day on, his luck changes and the numbers bring him only bad luck, sending him inexorably into an abyss that he might not recover from. Thomas Ott's O. Henry-esque plot twists will delight fans of classic horror like The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt, or modern masters like filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan; his hallucinatory, hyper-detailed scratchboard illustrations will haunt you long after you've put the book down.

I was sucked in by this image and the overall sense of looming dread Ott can create.  SF horror is unique to the genre because it can truly work in the fear of the unknown, and cosmic horror has a realistic sense of turning humans so minuscule in the course of space that it chills us to the bone.  The mysteries of the universe can frighten the imagination like other genres cannot.

Here is another image of a more deliberately SF piece:

While here is one that is simply unsettling:

More Douglas Smith

“Starry Night” by Tanya (school teacher)

This pieces makes me imagine of the crystal clear nights of the pre-urban and pre-industrial world. Humanity has always had an infatuation towards the stars.  Whether it be images of gods, fate, or simply outer-space, the night sky has captured our collective imagination.

Scratchboard Artwork by Douglas Smith

When focusing on scratchboards for my highschool art class, I was inspired by the sense of mystery and awe created by Douglas Smith.  And though not always and obviously science fiction, I often embellished the story behind his work and included SF aspects.  A lot of SF is exploring the unknown, and Douglas Smith evokes the unknown through his work.

What is in the box.  I imagine this as a CIA agent recovering a special secret artifact or piece of technology.  Could a human creation as powerful and frightening as  Kawalec’s Zeta Bomb be inside?

This may have some fantasy interpretations.  It could also be a mad scientist (trope) running away from a botched monster or visiting aliens.  The ominous feeling of the unknown is conveyed through this work, and it can be fun to speculate.

This work looks the most obviously SF, whether they are building or excavating a humanoid.