Illustration and movies in Beneficial Shock! magazine
We delivered Beneficial Shock! magazine to Stack subscribers in December last year, and when I spoke with editor and art director Gabriel Solomons for our latest Magazine Club conversation, I began by asking him how he describes what he does. Is this a movie magazine with illustrations, or an illustration magazine with movies?
Both parts feel equally important to the magazine today, but he’s clear that when he started in 2017, it was the movies that came first, and illustration provided a flexible and economical way of achieving what he and co-founder Phil Wrigglesworth wanted to make. Phil left the magazine at issue seven to focus on his own title, Left Cultures, and from issue eight Gabriel redesigned Beneficial Shock!, making is slightly smaller, slightly thicker, and leaning even further into the opportunities afforded by illustration.
These days the illustrators in the magazine don’t just provide artwork, and several formats invite illustrators to write as well as draw. It’s all part of an editorial approach that focuses on individuals responding to movies that have been particularly important to their life or work over the years. There are no reviews, and no attempt at providing an objective guide to what’s on at the movies – rather the emphasis is on using films as a way of exploring personal memories and meanings.
You can see our full conversation in the video below, and if this all leaves you wanting more, you can buy copies of issue 10 in the Stack shop. Or of course if you sign up for our magazine club we’ll be able to deliver a different independent title to you every month. (And then you can join our Magazine Club evenings to hear the editors sharing the stories behind the stories in the issues we sent out.)
