After serving in the Marines during World War II, self-taught artist and typographer Paul Bacon (1923-2015) landed in New York City, where he designed several now-famous album covers for jazz labels Blue Note and Riverside Records. Bacon had discovered jazz in the ’30s, and he remained a great fan—he was befriended by Thelonious Monk, among others—throughout his life…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
I guess we should begin at the beginning. I first got into Judge Dredd and 2000 AD in 1983, when Eagle Comics (founded by Nick Landau) started anthologizing the strip for an American audience. The Eagle editions were in color (I had no idea the original 2000 AD was black and white for many years), and the Dredd comics came with new, mind-bending covers by Brian Bolland. I had been collecting comics pretty obsessively for a few years at that point, but had never seen anything like Dredd…
The Tech-Noir club scene in The Terminator is a masterpiece of action film-making, arguably the most important sequence of the movie, and the club itself—its decor and atmosphere, its customers, its soundtrack, its very name—has had an extraordinary influence on the development of sci-fi and subsequent reimaginings of the 1980s aesthetic…
The sport and art of skateboarding advanced rapidly in the 1980s, as did the subculture surrounding it. Though limited mostly to the contest circuit and empty pools and reservoirs (a Southern California discovery brought about by drought) in the previous decade, the invention of the polyurethane wheel and other advancements—wider, lighter, concaved decks with a pronounced kicktail—allowed skateboarders to go faster and develop new tricks…
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was a central figure in the hod rod and custom car scene that flourished in 1950s and early 1960s Southern California. Born in Beverly Hills to German immigrants, Roth grew up in Bell, California, home of “speed shop” Bell Auto Parts and nearby Slauson Avenue, a popular drag strip. After a stretch in the Air Force, Roth became a sign painter at Sears and, in 1958, starting designing cars out of his garage…
Hundreds of books on various psychic phenomena—both surveys and how-to manuals, sometimes both—were released throughout the 1960s, as the paranormal, especially ESP, began to be taken seriously by academics and the American and Soviet intelligence communities. What makes Sixth Sense notable, apart from a convincing cover illustration, is that it’s essentially a kid’s book…
There are two Amityville horrors: the first happened in the pre-dawn hours of November 13, 1974, when 23-year-old Ronald Defeo Jr. shot and killed his father, mother, two brothers, and two sisters while they slept. He confessed to the murders the following day, and during the trial told the court that “voices” told him to do it. The second happened when a young couple, George and Kathleen Lutz, moved into the former Defeo residence…
By The Mutants
As the end of the 1970s approached, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the space-age fantasies the West had been nurturing for twenty years led nowhere real, or at least nowhere permanent, and that terrestrials were seeking some kind of emotional repository for the dreams they had been dreaming, as well as a pressure valve for their multiplying tensions…
The first issue of Atomic War! tells the story of a future America—the year is 1960—in which the embarrassingly gullible U.S. government and the bumbling United Nations are bamboozled by the “smiling conciliation” of the Russians and their seemingly “enthusiastic efforts for peace…”
Christmas cards became ubiquitous in the post-war era, when millions of Americans retreated to a more secluded existence in the rapidly developing suburbs. As small towns—idealized by Frank Capra and Norman Rockwell, among others—started to be displaced by tract housing complexes and chain stores, embellished scenes of the vanishing idyllic communities became a standard trope on greeting cards…
We Are the Mutants 