Thompson & Steadman

I'd like to look at the process an artist undertakes when they set out to illustrate a piece of writing, at how decisions are made and how not only the audience but the author responds to them. Thus I want to look at illustrator/writer relationships

Hunter S Thompson & Ralph Steadman

Creative review issue: 

Mark Sinclair

A famous and iconic collaboration the pair heavily influence (some say invented) Gonzo Journalism, a style that attempts to be non-objective and is usually written in first person and published without editing so it reads as the author wrote it. Both Illustrator and author are now inseparable from the style.

Steadman on illustrating the article: "The concept was by Hunter, but the pictures, drawn by me, argumented the crazy dimension he had hoped he could single-handedly create in his fat notebook."
Writing in the New York Times a few months after Thompson's suicide in 2005, Rich Cohen cited Steadman's art as successfully depicting the murk which Thompson had dug up just beneath the surface of manufactured America "The drawings are the plastic torn away and the people seen are monsters." Without Steadman's pictures - Thompson's monsters made flesh- Fear and Loathing would be a wildly different beast."

Obviously the images here majorly changed the way the text was read, the reading experience would be wholly different were it not for the combination, as stated: this is what makes the text successful. The drawings do not illustrate as if to describe but as a second layer, a realisation of what Thompson was trying to say, of the view he had on the world and society. On a baser level the illustrations also reflect the drug fused haze the narrative is written in.

“The pictures weren’t about the story; they were a reflection of the story, what was in Hunter’s mind,” -Steadman