Suzan Lovett - Fanlore

Suzan Lovett is a slash and gen writer and prolific artist. She started drawing for Star Trek in the early 80s. She has done hundreds of illustrations in many fandoms; het, gen and slash.

For a while she sold prints of her art and archived copies can be found via Wayback at the squidge.org and kixxster.org incarnation of her old website. Some of her fantasy based Blake's 7 art is archived at the Blake's 7 Guide and in a Blake's 7 Fan Art Gallery.

More recently she offered a beautiful print of her House/Wilson painting called Abiding Spirits at housemd-guide.com and two Torchwood prints in the jackxianto community.^[1]

Suzan's fanfiction is available at her new Partnersrmore site.

Illustrator

Suzan's favorite medium is graphite pencil on cold-press pen&ink boards because of the way the pencil flows on smooth paper and the different results one can get just by simply layering and/or varying the pressure on the same tool,^[2] but work as a fanartist in the past was often limited by what editors could reproduce. For Suzan it meant that "getting pencil work reproduced was expensive, so I was told to draw in ink if I wanted to be in a zine, and for a while I did. It's an unforgiving medium, and my work needs a lot of forgiving, then and now, so I was really happy when I was finally able to get pencil drawings accepted."^[3]

Her early work in 1980 was pretty erotic. When asked to explain her limits, she said that she had no qualms about drawing erotic art, but there were some subjects (S&M, etc.) she refused to do^[4] and that she tried to capture love. "[I]n any case, though, I mostly want a drawing to give form to an idea and/or distill a story into an image."^[5] When she was asked what inspired her to draw K/S, she said that drawing K/S wasn't about expressing her own vision, but about giving life to someone else's alternate universe. Making a distinction between an artist and an illustrator, she explained: "I'm not an artist; I'm an illustrator, and illustrators are mainly story-tellers, in shapes and forms rather than words."^[6]

Notable Art

Cover of the zine Harlequin Airs (1993)

In the '90s, Suzan did an entire series of 25 images featuring Bodie and Doyle from The Professionals in circus garb to illustrate Ellis Ward's AU novel Harlequin Airs.

Scanned images of the art have been archived on the Pros Circuit Archive, and are also embedded in the story itself.

At Anglicon in 1993, Suzan Lovett sent a set of original Harlequin Airs color drawings for the art show that the con organizers didn't hang "because they were art for a slash zine", even though they were not at all explicit, and they did choose to display a print of a completely naked Tasha Yar draped over a clothed Data.

Notable Fiction

• Goliath, a gen h/c Starsky & Hutch novel, with great art by her and an even better story: an excellent exploration of Starsky and Hutch's relationship post-Sweet Revenge.

• A Fine Storm, a Starsky & Hutch slash novella that appeared in Code 7 #4, built around a painfully believable misunderstanding plot.

• The Road to Hell, a Blake's 7 story that was originally published in Powerplay #1 (1987) and later was reprinted together with Suzan's other four Blake's 7 stories (online versions available here) in the British edited The Road to Hell and Other Stories. The Road to Hell is a second season AU. Summary from the online version: "Blake is in desperate trouble, and it's up to Avon to rescue him. The rescue turns out to be far harder and takes much longer than Avon expected because Blake is not exactly himself." Many consider The Road to Hell, Lovett's first and longest story, one of the best Blake and Avon stories ever written.

Gallery

The Adult Kirk	All the Queen's Men	Angel in the Dark	Antinomy	Awakenings #1
Awakenings #2	Back to Back	Blue Eyes and Blue Jeans #1	The Boys Are Back #2	Catch a Fallen Star
Crystal Blue Persuasion	Dark Fantasies #2	Escape from New York #1	Escape from New York #2	Escape from New York #3
Essential Sentinel #1	Essential Sentinel #2	Dangerous Lives, Dangerous Visions #1	Distant Shores	Dyad #24
Favorite Things-front	Favorite Things-back	Goliath - front	Goliath - back	Harlequin Airs
Heatwave	A Hunting We Will Go	If Love is Real: Addiction	Leather and Blue Jeans	Legend's End
Liaisons #2	Master of the Revels	Motet #3	Murder on San Carmelitas	Never Far Apart v.1
Never Far Apart v.2, with Lorraine Brevig	Odyssey 6	Odyssey 6.5	Odyssey 7	On the Double #33
The Pandora's Box Affair	Perestroika	Powerplay #1	Powerplay #6	Power Play-back
Primal Instinct #1	Primal Instinct #2	Primal Instinct #3	Primal Instinct #4	Revolution - front
Revolution - back	The Road to Hell and Other Stories	Sanctuary	Sardonac	Saurian Brandy Digest #32 - back
The Sensual World #5	The Sleeping Beauty Affair	front cover of Sodality	Somebody New	The St. Crispin's Day Society #3
Summer's End	Taemon's Cuckoos	Thank You Kindly	The Thousandth Man -front	The Thousandth Man - back
There Are Three	Timeless-cover	Timeless-fold out	Total Eclipse of the Heart	Turned to Fire
Warriors #1	What If...	Whisper of a Kill

References