In 1977, with von Däniken mania still thriving, Alfred Górny of Polish publishing house Sport i Turystyka—Sport and Tourism—made an agreement with Econ Verlag, the publishers of the German edition of Chariots of the Gods?, to create a series of comics based around von Däniken’s crackpot concepts…
Most editions of Vidas Ilustres dealt purely with the biographical details of the person in question, but in the Obras Inmortales (“Immortal Works”) series the comic would dramatize not only their life but also a piece of their oeuvre. This was the case with “El Hombre Que Se Convirtirio En Un Insecto”—“The Man Who Became an Insect.”
Heir to the role of freewheeling individualism once inhabited by the cowboy, over the course of the 1970s the truck driver grew to be an increasingly dominant figure in the American imagination…
A favorite gift of British nanas, uncles and aunts of the 1970s, transfers—like coloring books—inhabit the deadening overlap between creativity and restriction. As liberating as they always looked while still in their packets, once out on the kitchen table, doing transfers frequently turned out to be a depressingly uninspiring activity. Not so Thomas Salter and Letraset’s Space Adventures…
A strange talisman of British middle- and lower-middle-class aspirations of the 1960s and 1970s, Denbyware—the costly, absurdly heavy, hard-wearing (read, impossible to rid yourself of or destroy) brand of British tableware famed for its dun-colored hues, threatening shapes, and cranial-trauma patterns—was for a time the ne plus ultra of performative provincial socializing…
A rendering of the future in the form of a short stretch of corrugated steel, this neon tunnel that once greeted visitors to the foyer of 127 John Street in New York City feels innately familiar, even archetypal…
How a Baby Is Made was the English language translation of Danish psychotherapist and “sexologist” Per Holm Knudsen’s children’s picture book Sådan får man et barn, published in Denmark in 1971. After winning the Danish Ministry of Culture’s children book prize in 1972, the rights were acquired in Britain where Piccolo Books, the children’s division of paperback publisher Pan, published it the following year…
Of all the weird remnants to have filtered down into British popular culture of the late 20th century, the toy soldier was one of the most pervasive. The British Army had long been an important element—read facilitator and enforcer—of the country’s imperialist culture…
The world is a dangerous place, and nowhere is this more true—subjectively speaking—than in its safest, most fortunate corners. I’ve spoken before about how the postwar UK seemed sometimes to be living in a traumatized fugue state of danger and threat. Here, then, is the bible of that particular belief system: the Reader’s Digest’s 1986 What to Do in an Emergency…
Though active for only a brief period of time, artist Garry Sharpe-Young created a series of LP covers that provide a thrilling miniature survey of the mental landscapes of the British heavy metal music scene of the 1980s…
We Are the Mutants 