Six large, full-color plates by renowned artist John Pound. Edition of 1200, signed and numbered on the inside of the portfolio.
From the liner notes:
John Pound was born October 8, 1952 in Phoenix, Arizona. While John was still an infant, his family moved to San Diego, where he spent most of his life. He currently lives and works in Eureka, California. In his junior high and high school years, John grew to be an avid fan of monster movies, science fiction, and the comics. He and a few like-minded friends would meet in a bookstore owned by local character and member of "First Fandom" Ken Krueger. The group published a fanzine and visited several West Coast science fiction conventions. John was also among the organizers of the first three San Diego Comic Conventions, which are now in their eleventh year.
Pound began cartooning for underground comix in the early 1970s, appearing in titles such as Gory Stories Quarterly (his first work, published by Krueger), Death Rattle, Savage Humor, and Marvel's short-lived attempt at an underground, Comix Book. His characters Flip the Bird and Ronald Rabbit, co-created with Dave Clark, were mainstays in those stories.
As John's cartooning skills grew more and more polished, he began work on a solo comic book, Ronald the Barbarian. The artwork, the result of nearly a year's effort, was stolen in a burglary of the publisher's home. There were no other copies and the work was lost forever. This occurred at a time when Pound's interest in cartooning was waning. His aspirations were turning toward painting and illustration. Pound preferred to spend more time on each piece than was practical or profitable for a comic-book artist. The loss of Ronald the Barbarian served to eradicate John's interest in doing comic strips. He does feel his time as a cartoonist was well spent, however, calling it "one of my schools" for illustration.
He began to concentrate on cover art for underground comix, producing a remarkable series that has not yet run its course. As those covers became slicker and more professional, Pound found himself one of the most in-demand cover artists for those books. Particularly noteworthy pieces were done for Dope Comix #2, No Ducks #2, Commies From Mars #2, Dope Comix Anthology, and the Krupp mail-order catalogs. These covers are notable for their outstanding use of color, as well as their precise draftsmanship. As his work has become better known, Pound has begun doing more and more work for mainstream publishers. He is producing covers on a regular basis for DAW Books and Marvel Comics' Howard the Duck magazine.
In 1979, John's first limited-edition portfolio, Beyond Heaven and Hell, was
published by Schanes and Schanes. The portfolio is a series of black and white acrylic paintings, with the final plate depicting a combat scene in which the combatants are a boar-headed, helmeted warrior vying with a savage wolf-headed berserker. This image was a powerful one, and it held Pound's fascination long after the painting was completed. When a color portfolio was commissioned, John decided to expand upon the theme of a war between different races of beast-men. He discussed this theme with friend and sometime collaborator Steve Garris, who contributed to the concepts for the imagery. The resulting series of paintings, representing a year of slow, constantly revised rendering, is the portfolio that you hold in your hands, Power and Glory.
When asked to comment on the work for these notes, John stated, "Power and Glory is cannibalistic." Asked to elaborate this Dali-esque statement, he responded, "That term works on a couple of levels with regard to the portfolio, both in the content of the images and my approach to the paintings]. The animals are cannibalistic, as seen in the last plate. In terms of technique, it's like l'm creating a new Frankenstein monster out of old body parts-[some of which are] bits and pieces of other images. My approach is intuitive, using these different elements until the picture has a kind of deja vu quality, as if a dream image. I feel a certain 'rightness' to these images, as if they are the only way such a scene could ever be."
John Pound has created much more than "a new Frankenstein monster." He has created a new world, a world of Power and Glory. Galaxies of new worlds such as these await; they need only Pound's hand and eye to open their doors. As the future unfolds, so will they, for this is one artist who will be stimulating our imaginations for many fascinating years.
