Some R/C Fanart from Old Fanzines

[erimia]

Found on ancientphantom's tumblr. Both pictures are zine covers, both are from the 1990s and both are quite unusual portrayals of Raoul.



This is the cover for the issue 1 of POTO: The Phantom of the Opera Magazine, by the artist Sharon Young. Probably the first time I've seen a Raoul with a beard. He also looks a great deal older than Raouls usually are, and so does this Christine. Not sure if those are portraits of actors from the musical or not.



The back cover art by Sybille Schenk for the issue 7 of The Chandelier, the zine that was published mostly in German. Again, I don't know if those are meant to be actors from the musical but it's quite possible. It may be an early example of a long-haired Raoul, a trope that I thought had appeared only after the 2004 movie, but apparently not.

Comments

[igenlode]

Interesting -- I thought I was the first to do Raoul-with-a-beard! Though yes, the two in that top picture look much older than you'd expect; in fact, if it weren't for the Lyre of Apollo background I don't think anyone would identify them with Raoul and Christine at all. More like Arthur and Guinevere -- though I'm not sure I'd ever visualised either Christine or Guinevere with that confident, slightly smug smile ;-p


Unlikely to be a portrayal of specific cast members simply because of the beard; I find it hard to imagine anyone putting on a stage production featuring a bearded Vicomte, given any alternative. You might get away with it somewhere in Northern Europe perhaps? ;-D
Ever since Christine Brightman, stage Christines have usually been represented with long curly hair, as well...

Given the disparity of size and apparent age I actually wonder if that was intended to be a depiction of Christine's father -- but maybe it is just post-canon Raoul and Christine as a mature married couple, he with an adult beard, she with her hair decorously put up (though not very decorously, with a rose over one ear!) and the Phantom in the background as part of a composite image?

Now that you point it out it is very odd.


Ouch. The art in most of those old zone covers is *really bad*.
https://66.media.tumblr.com/9794d9fb1ed8d37a8b970d072ee8694a/tumblr_o4lpm0uBTk1r9esgro3_1280.jpg


In this one, Christine appears to be a mermaid, and Raoul the Phantom has a beaver tail!
https://66.media.tumblr.com/fcb3ea7583101a08b73f3e3eae9e6f3b/tumblr_o4lp98NkqP1r9esgro7_1280.jpg

The R/C ones are definitely some of the better pictures ;-D

Not only a long-haired Raoul but a Morticia-Addams-type Christine in the lower picture (for some reason I keep expecting to see a glimpse of the Phantom in the gap between them, because I'm visualising this as the kiss in Leroux after Erik releases Raoul from the Communards' dungeon, when the young couple embrace in front of him).

[erimia]

Hm, maybe it's not quite Raoul and Christine but some fans or production people that were interviewed for this zine portrayed as them? An interesting possibility.

I actually like quite a lot of those zine fanarts (though my standards for visual art are quite low), but when they are bad, they are very bad.

I found another zine art featuring Raoul and Christine where Raoul looks more like he usually does in the musical, but it seems to be from an E/C fic, if the surrounding text is any indication. On the plus side, this Raoul somewhat reminds me of David Bowie, of all people.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/File:Maskstales7-3.jpg

[igenlode]

Unless the artist of the top cover is really talented and original, I'd guess that they probably are copied from some kind of photo, because they're just too realistic otherwise. Not one fan artist in a thousand can draw an individual face in a random pose without a 'reference' to work from, although quite a few can do very good reproductions from the same stock picture (and in the days of screencaps and DVDs, they're not limited to the same handful of recognisable publicity shots any more -- there were a couple of Blake/Avon headshot poses that turn up again and again...)

That Christine actually looks familiar to me, but I can't think from where. (I'm thinking Spanish/Italian for some reason -- Frida Kahlo style. And it would go with the rose behind the ear.)

Could it be... the Mystery Legends game?

https://ladycdaae.livejournal.com/10921.html

No, apparently not (although the Raoul is distinctly similar, save that this one definitely doesn't have long hair, and his beard is more substantial.) And anyway, that zine predates the game.

---

Looking like David Bowie (and it's more than 'somewhat') is *not* a good thing in that context; he's looking condescending and self-confident, and Christine is looking terrified and pleading -- not dreamy and lost in a sea of fairy-tale magic as the text claims, but then the narrator is clearly a paranoid lunatic whose conclusions appear to bear zero relationship to what he is actually observing :-p

(I mean, seriously, he is looking at Raoul and explicitly seeing purity and innocence and protectiveness, and jumping from that to the conclusion that he has the perfect face for seduction (which tells us more about Erik's thought processes than Raoul's), and jumping from *that* to the conclusion that he is a demon full of vile schemes who only lusts after Christine in order to despoil her body. Based on... nothing, so far as the reader can see. I don't think the author realises that her protagonist is coming across as obsessively delusional -- entirely in character for Erik, of course, but one has a sneaking suspicion that we are assuming to be accepting Erik's statements quite literally.)