[4] The lurid pulp covers of the Fantômas series, drawn by the Italian artist Gino Starace, were no doubt nearly as much an inspiration to the Surrealists as the texts within; powerful full-colour images that include a hooded man on the gallows, two men trapped in a blazing barrel, the poisoned corpse of a beautiful woman, a sleeping man menaced by a black-clad assassin, two nuns peering into an empty coffin, a bride in white gown and black face-mask, a terrified man face up in the guillotine. All reinforcing one of the main themes in the Fantômas books: that sudden death is always imminent. But Starace’s enduring image of Fantômas is that from the very first novel; the gigantic figure of the Lord of Terror himself, formally attired and masked like a bandit, towers over nocturnal Paris, dwarfing even the Eiffel Tower, and grasping, half-concealed, a bloody stiletto in his right hand. Several of these covers were reproduced by Georges Bataille in his counter-Breton journal, Documents (1929–30).

[5] Salvador Dalí, in particular, had a great compulsion towards the deathshead motif in his paintings and drawings of the 1930’s.

[6] Cadavre Exquis: literally, “exquisite corpse”. In 1925, at 54 rue du Chateau, the Surrealists played a form of Consequences. Everyone wrote a secret word on a folded sheet of paper before passing it to his neighbour. The first sentence obtained in this arbitrary manner was “the exquisite corpse drank the new wine”. This Surrealist game, in which the random procedure was viewed as a form of dream-work, was also often practised in Surrealist drawing. Another popular Surrealist game, said to be favoured by Georges Sadoul, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, and Yves Tanguy, involved one person calling out a Fantômas title, and the others trying to guess the number of murders committed in that episode. Tanguy also painted Fantômas No.1 (1925-26), a spacially distorted rendering that features indistinct figures, a nude blood-splattered corpse, and Surrealist flourishes such as a cluster of eggs.