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…
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…
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…
With endemic labor disputes, recession, and social upheaval threatening from within, the Britain of the late 1970s and early 1980s increasingly saw itself as under siege from external threats…
Along with Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and several ancient monoliths attributed to ancient astronauts in Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968), Stonehenge became a symbol of occult mystery in the 1970s…
As the 20th century grew more precarious, humans often found comfort in the idea of incorporating “superior” technology into their all-too-fragile flesh and blood…
Known colloquially as the Serpentone (“big snake”), the Corviale is a vast housing development on the outskirts of Rome originally intended to house some 8,500 inhabitants in three structures dominated by a single, kilometer-long, eleven-story block…
Upon first coming across them, it is barely possible to believe that Warning is not simply a superhumanly dexterous hoax, so perfectly engineered do they seem for the purposes of titillating the psychological taste buds of anyone who grew up in the incipient Star Wars era nurturing an unsophisticated love of horror, the occult, cosmic electronica, and sci-fi…
The glow-in-the-dark “Nuclear Death” mask was released in 1979 by Don Post Studios, an American company specializing in producing merchandise for the burgeoning Halloween industry…
With a reputation for intractability and a ubiquity afforded him by a decades-long involvement in the Italian equivalent of the pulps, Magnus (not to be confused with his robot-punching namesake) was, until his death in 1996, one of Italy’s most prolific and distinctive comic book artists…
We Are the Mutants 