It would be nice to say that Les Edwards needs no introduction, but it might be more accurate to say that he should need no introduction. Despite the vast influence his work has exerted upon science fiction, horror, and fantasy illustration over the last forty-odd years, he remains perhaps less well-known than he deserves outside the battlements of genre art…
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea of contacting spirits and ghosts using the new technologies created in the fields of sound reproduction and transmission grew out of the fertile ground of the Spiritualist movement…
For several decades in the second half of the 20th century, paperback anthologies of horror stories were a profitable niche industry. The Pan Book of Horror Stories series, initially edited by Herbert Van Thal, ran from 1959 to 1989, and early volumes sold over half a million copies…
If you’re like me, and you played Dungeons & Dragons in the ’70s and ‘80s, then you likely encountered someone who told you you were going to Hell. Maybe your born again aunt slipped you the infamous Jack Chick pamphlet, Dark Dungeons…
The Circus Report, if this particular issue is indicative, was put together like an old-school zine: clip art, text laid out in a handful of different fonts, very clearly mocked up on a photocopier, and so forth. But these stories aren’t about the latest indie bands. They’re news articles about minor-league circuses in trouble for animal cruelty…
The impact the original Star Wars had on the pop cultural landscape was so huge that it created ripples reaching to the most unexpected corners…
By the mid-1980s, the outside world had to some extent caught up with the aesthetic of Heavy Metal, an American science fiction and fantasy comics magazine originally licensed from the French magazine Métal Hurlant beginning in 1977…
By K.E. Roberts and Brother Bill
The Three Investigators series was published between 1964 and 1987, with the “Hitchcock editions” (featuring cover illustrations by Robert Adragna and Hitchcock’s shadowed profile in the top right corner) first appearing in 1978, to great success…
By J.G. Newman
What should have been a couple-session run-through of an old RPG somehow morphed into a piecemeal, month-long slog. It’s the first “historically significant” game I’ve played that feels like a cave painting, a work enjoyable only as a first step toward things to come…
Released by Bally in 1980, Xenon was the first pinball game to feature a female voice (the first speaking pinball machine being the previous year’s sword and sorcery-themed Gorgar). Designed by Greg Kmiec and featuring sensual artwork by Paul Faris—which clearly showed the influence of underground and European comics…
We Are the Mutants 