Gabriel Solomons and Phil Wrigglesworth both teach at Bristol School of Art and Design, and both share a frustration with the state of contemporary illustration. Wrigglesworth worries about the softening of the field — polished technique valued higher than having a point of view, students more interested in the presentation of their work than in the content being discussed within it. Solomons, a designer and editor, saw the same problem from the commissioning side: illustration treated as a decorative service industry rather than a form of critical thinking. In 2017, they launched a Kickstarter for Beneficial Shock! — an annual, fully illustrated film magazine that would use cinema as a starting point for brave, informed, and occasionally very funny visual storytelling.
The magazine commissions illustrators to respond to cinematic subjects with original work — not literal translations of scenes but re-interpretations, visual essays, and idiosyncratic responses that treat film writing and illustration with the seriousness of literature. In some issues, the editors inverted the usual process entirely: the illustration came first, and the writing was built around it. The result is a publication that draws inevitable comparisons to Little White Lies but has, from its first issue, set its own terms. A feature might decode the hidden psychology of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, chart the history of film censorship, or pair a reportage interview with a sound-effects specialist with Gary Embury’s on-location drawings. Issue ten, the Journeys and Destinations issue, covered The Brutalist, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and the sauntering lives of slackers.
Published from Bristol at 170×240mm, running to 96 pages, and now ten issues deep, Beneficial Shock! received a commendation at the Stack Awards 2017 for Best Use of Illustration. magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie called it a riot of colour and creativity. The magazine has since been stocked at the Eye Filmmuseum shop in Amsterdam and independent bookshops worldwide. For Wrigglesworth and Solomons, the project is proof that illustration can be more than decoration — that when you give image-makers genuine editorial freedom and a subject worth thinking about, what comes back is not just art but argument.
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