These superbly nightmarish pen and ink visuals were preliminary character studies for the 1994 James Herbert Graphic novel “The City” Illustrated by Ian Miller in his indomitable scratchy Gothic style – a really great demonstration of the detail achievable with dip pen, brush and ink.
The City is the fourth installment of Herbert’s popular Rats Series, It maps a chilling post-apocalyptic future where the pathetic remnants of mankind scrape out an existence in ruins under the new order – The Rats! available here on Amazon – thats just got me thinking, what the difference between Post-Apocalyptic and Steampunk?
Images featured courtesy of Ian Miller, via his http://www.ian-miller.org/ portfolio site.
Easy man, for steampunk, there was no apocalypse.
Comment by Nicolas Delsaux — September 17, 2008 @ 8:33 am
Comment by admin — September 17, 2008 @ 8:38 am
Perhaps steam-punk is kind of; ‘how would the modern world/future have turned out without certain 20th century technologies (internal combustion, airplanes, electricity etc) but still with a healthy amount of industrial progress’. Kind of like an extrapolation of classic Victorian-era industrial revolution. (along with all of the social problems that also characterised that era) The earliest example that I can think of is Michael Moorcock book Warlords Of The Air. It an ‘alternative progress’ By contrast the post apolicaliptic genre is inherently regressive. It deals with societies that have lost the technologies and structures that they once had. something that could still actually happen, whereas steam-punk never could because we can’t un-invent things.
Comment by Dick — September 17, 2008 @ 1:32 pm
I see yeah, very good breakdown… I guess I when I think of steampunk I think of Victorian Era or early 20th style with modern-ish Technology – I watched “The Mutant Chronicles” for my sins on a Torrent
that had a very visually interesting style, but it was set in the 27th century? although it looked like it was set in between the World Wars… was pretty good, the RPG game supposed on which it’s based is supposed to be aload better of course 
Comment by admin — September 17, 2008 @ 2:19 pm
Great post! I have this graphic novel, it completely passed me by that he had designs from that book on his site – makes me think I should go ahead and post some of his other work that I have lying about…
I like to think of Steampunk and Post-Apocalyptic differing in their depictions of alternate society (steampunk) and environment (post-apocalyptic), though the two converge on a large scale :B
Comment by Jeff — September 17, 2008 @ 7:19 pm
Yeah I’m going try and get hold of this Novel for sure- though it’s $60 bucks on Amazon at the moment…
I guess Post-Apocalyptic been the more popular Genre, but that’s only natural due to the large number ways we have to blow ourselves up!
Comment by admin — September 18, 2008 @ 12:54 am
to whom it may concern . the listed url: http://www.ian-miller.net/ is sadly a non functioning site /frozen, about which I am unable to do anything at present.
The site relevant to my work and operated by me is at: ian-miller.org.
this is updated weekly, sometimes daily and very much alive.
I hope this situation can be adjusted to allow access to the new site
Thank you
ian miller
Comment by Ian miller — October 6, 2008 @ 5:53 pm
No probs Ian, thats been sorted….
Comment by admin — October 6, 2008 @ 6:32 pm