Mike Hinge’s 72-year-old body lay undiscovered in his Philadelphia apartment for a week after his death. It was an ignoble, but perhaps not unsurprising, end to a life of imagination, determination and refusal to compromise.
Hinge was born in Auckland in 1931. His father was a bus driver and his mother a nurse. Their son was an exceptionally gifted draftsman with an unusually vivid imagination.
The image of New Zealand in the 1950s is all too familiar: dull, drab, grey, monochrome. But look past the cliché and there were many colourful outsiders. One of these was Hinge, who lit up the life of a young Roger Horrocks, as the venerable cultural critic explains:
“In the mid-1950s, I was a schoolboy, an amateur astronomer, and an enthusiastic science fiction fan. I published a cyclostyled fanzine entitled KiwiFan. I had a holiday job in a city bookshop that sold science fiction and one day there I was astonished to discover a sophisticated publication called Fanzine TIME, which someone called Mike Hinge had published.
“I contacted Mike, who lived in Mission Bay, and he became my grown-up friend. The friendship was hugely important to me. Not only did he know all about science fiction, but he was also well informed about modern art and interested in experimental jazz and played the trumpet. He seemed incredibly modern and cool, with tight black clothes that made him look like a beatnik.”
His nonconformity didn’t end there. “To the consternation of audiences at Auckland cinemas, the Americanophile refused to stand when God Save The King was played before each film,” reported The Dominion Post’s Tom Cardy in an obituary in that paper. “He hated the Union Jack on the New Zealand flag and suggested a koru design instead.”
Like many of his peers, Hinge needed to move overseas to be himself. Having attended Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland and worked as a commercial artist – lawnmower ads, Farmers catalogues – he set his sights on the US. But unlike creative contemporaries who achieved international success, he did not do so on the strength of an Arts Council grant or Rotary Club fundraising. He flew solo, applying for a green card year after year until he won one and left New Zealand in 1958.
His independence meant he did not have to give talks to groups back home as payback for their support, and there were no newspaper stories to prove taxpayer money had been well spent. His career was passed in almost total obscurity in his homeland.
However, according to Nigel Rowe, a friend and historian of fandom, now based in the US, “he never shied away from being a New Zealander and telling people about New Zealand. There’s a lot of New Zealand and Pacific themes in some of his earlier artwork. He really wanted to be part of the American dream, but he didn’t want to be American.”
First in Los Angeles and then in New York, where he moved in 1966, Hinge continued to do commercial artwork while developing his career as a sci-fi illustrator.
He had been in contact with sci-fi circles before leaving New Zealand. Rather than being an elitist closed shop, this was a welcoming, collegial group of talented people who shared their enthusiasm for all things otherworldly. He got to the US, says Rowe, “a month before the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles. He had contributed artwork to people’s fanzines and he was already admired. He was embraced as the New Zealand delegate.”
At this convention, he first came to the attention of sci-fi éminence grise and Hugo Award (an annual award for the best sci-fi fiction) winner Ted White. “I had received a few fanzines from New Zealand that had his art in it, and it was quite striking,” says White. “Around 1965 or 66 we connected up again.”
His work stood out from the start. “It was strikingly new and different. Nominally sci-fi illustrations, they were innovative and pointed a fresh way forward. When I became the editor of Amazing Science Fiction Stories and Fantastic magazines, I could put my admiration for Mike’s work to practical use and publish his art.”
Hinge did interior illustrations and designed typefaces and headings, “but his covers were the big thing. His first cover for Amazing was a painting he’d done almost 10 years earlier. It depicted a giant robotic hand, and was painted using silver and gold [metallic-flake] paints in addition to the usual colour spectrum.”
It only hinted at the covers to come. “I felt at the time – the 70s – that Mike had shown the first new path for sci-fi art since [Richard M] Powers’ paperback covers of the 50s.”
Until then, science fiction art had been illustrative, depicting the events in the story, as often as not a monster ravishing a buxom victim in the foreground while the hero appeared over the horizon. Powers changed that but, “Mike Hinge’s art was the next step. It had class. It was basically a whole new concept and approach,” says White.
Alongside covers and interior illustrations, Hinge’s creativity manifested itself in all sorts of ways, many with no obvious commercial application.
“Mike liked to work large,” recalled friend and fan Sanford Zane Meschkow in a blog post. “One of his works, lost in various moves, was a room-sized mural with a historical New Zealand theme that included a lot of Māori art motifs.”
He describes helping clean out Hinge’s apartment after his death in 2003.
“His effects included a huge collection of slides. A few were of his artwork. Many more were of kinetic sculptures and frames from incomprehensible experimental movies. But the majority of the slides were part of a huge reference file.
“Think street signs, fire hydrants, traffic lights, street lamps, sewer grates, manhole covers, store fronts, posters on fences, cast iron gates, etc. It was as if he was collecting reference material to build a gigantic back lot version of New York.”
Hinge lived with Meschkow and his wife for a time and in exchange for board “he offered to paint our house – if he could pick the colours … We said no, but gently.”
Other work was definitely commercial. He was commissioned by Stanley Kubrick to design a “cryogenic module” to help promote 2001: A Space Odyssey in cinemas. Like many things the film-maker got people to do, it was never used.
He did meticulous imagery of a fictional space shuttle, which was included in The Mars One Crew Manual published by Ballantine Books, in 1985. Rears Its Ugly Green Head was a comic-strip collaboration between Hinge and comic book legend Neal Adams, published in Ted White’s Heavy Metal magazine. At one low point, Hinge was sleeping on a couch in the back of Adams’ studio.
More lucratively, he designed two covers for Time magazine, which now hang in the Smithsonian Museum. One was of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito and another of President Richard Nixon at the time of the Watergate scandal, when the possibility of impeachment was in the air. “The amounts that stick in my memory were $2000 for a cover and $1000 for a kill fee at a time when book covers were being paid several hundred dollars,” says White.
But although Hinge didn’t spurn good fees, he didn’t prioritise them. His vision was more important than his income and that vision was sharply focused. This could make him, by all accounts, difficult to work with.
To be uncompromising is not the New Zealand way. Traditionally, and to this day, New Zealanders making their way in big overseas markets are affable, agreeable and very keen to please in order to get ahead. Hinge was none of those things, and it held him back because, while people recognised his talent, they also recognised that his irascibility – which was how his commitment to his vision expressed itself – was a problem.
Blogger and former colleague Alex Jay wrote, “He was always a real pain to work with: he was exacting, exasperating, found it hard to compromise.” White agrees: “He could have a prickly personality, and while I never had any problems with Mike, I was the exception to the rule. He tended to tick off art directors. This tended to limit his commercial viability.”
Rowe says Hinge had been an art director at a number of Madison Avenue agencies and had “always kind of run afoul of people, because he was very precise and he really wanted things done his way. He didn’t want people messing things up, which caused problems in his professional life.”
Hinge’s high standards for himself extended to other people’s work. As a young man, comic book artist Matt Howarth wanted to show him his (admittedly primitive at the time) art. “He proceeded to [verbally] tear my work to shreds, probably in an attempt to get this fanboy to move along. I took his comments to heart and went off to apply his remarks to bettering my art. I consider him one of my mentors. Although he would later rigorously deny that honour, not remembering our first encounter at all.”
These aspects of Hinge’s personality are also the likely explanation for his lack of personal relationships. No one recalls him ever having had a partner and he is known to have said his financially precarious lifestyle ruled out life with a wife and children.
Career sidelined
It’s hard not to see his last years as anything but a long-drawn-out downward trajectory of false starts and dead ends. He moved back to New Zealand for some months in 1983. His brother Noel had won the Golden Kiwi lottery and used the proceeds to help fund Mike’s return home. But although he found work at an advertising agency, his CV put him several pay grades above anyone else, and he was frustratingly sidelined. At this time he met Rowe, who recalls how, at the 1984 National Science Fiction Convention, “I was sitting at the registration desk, and this guy turned up and said, ‘I saw a poster on the street about the convention, so I thought I’d come along and have a look.’ And I said, ‘Oh, great, let me get your details. What’s your name?’ ‘It’s Mike Hinge.’ It stopped me dead. Not the Mike Hinge. And he was stunned that somebody knew who he was.
“At that moment, I was probably one of only three people at the conference who knew him, and the two others were friends of his from the 50s.”
Catching up with old friends was great, but the move home was temporary. Accounts differ as to whether this was because he just couldn’t settle or because he needed to return to the US to maintain his residency status. He moved back, first to New York then to Philadelphia. He renewed his New Zealand passport in 1995 but never returned.
By many accounts, Hinge could best be described as a loner who was very good company. Rowe has a particularly poignant memory from those later years: “We were at the Worldcon [World Science Fiction Convention] in Philadelphia in 2001. A big group of us were going out to dinner and Mike didn’t want to go to the restaurant we wanted to go to. He wanted to go somewhere cheaper. And so we were faced with this issue. And several people, including myself said, ‘Mike, don’t worry about it. We’ve got you covered.’ But he didn’t want to be a burden on somebody else, so he ended up not joining us for dinner, which was really sad.”
Rowe kept in touch with Hinge. “When he unexpectedly passed away, I volunteered to take his ashes back to New Zealand on my next trip. And I delivered these to his brother, Noel, in the rural wilds of New Zealand in 2004. There was a memorial in Auckland.”
Hinge left no will. But he left a vast trove of graphic material. The state of Pennsylvania auctioned off a lot of his work and more has since been traded on eBay.
Hinge would not have had to go overseas to achieve the same success today. Thanks to the internet, many New Zealand artists in the sci-fi and comics field, as well as musicians and writers and film-makers, are able to have good careers while based here.
As to his creative legacy, his entry at sf-encyclopedia.com says the “line-heavy electric intensity of his best work generated a considerable impact, despite the relatively small amount of acknowledged commissions on record. The range of hieratic renderings of psychedelia-derived imagery … conveys a vision of the iconic America he loved, deeply archaic in a Californian manner, as though reborn into a future.”
In 1958, when he left New Zealand, Hinge donated his collection of science fiction books to Auckland’s Central City Library, a gift acknowledged in a letter of thanks from City Librarian Robert Duthie. Now the favour is being returned with an exhibition of a wide range of his work at the library.
Lost in Time: The Art of Mike Hinge, Central City Library, Auckland, March 24-April 28.
