Shrunk now to an almost infinitesimally small dot in the rear-view mirror, 1977 continues to cast a strange shadow over our times. Perhaps one of what my colleague Mike has adroitly termed “hinge years”—those points when incipient forces in the psychosphere coalesce and react with one another, causing reality to shift direction…
O’Neill’s account of his two decades in a wilderness of conspiracies related to the Manson Family ultimately suggests some of the blame falls at the feet of a Cold War American intelligence/law enforcement/academic complex deeply compromised by its commitment to beating the Soviets at all costs…
More than perhaps any other example from the time, Soldier of Fortune is symptomatic of a white masculinity crisis that has poisoned the bloodstream of America—a wound untreated leads to sepsis—for almost 50 years…
Perhaps taking its lead from Troubador Press’s 1969 Zodiac Coloring Book—and coming out the same year as Troubador’s Occult Coloring Book—the Occult Datebook‘s beautifully vivid images perfectly epitomize the occult’s shift into the mainstream…
San Francisco’s Troubador Press, under the direction of founder and owner Malcolm Whyte, published a long line of innovative (and beloved, to many) coloring books from 1967 through the early ’80s. Often contracting illustrators with ties to the counterculture and underground comix, Whyte chose subjects that were sometimes anodyne—horses, ballet, wildlife, the Bible, dinosaurs—but often daring for the time…
In the spirit of High Weirdness, this review will try to weave an impressionistic, magical spell exploring the commonalities Davis unveils between the respective life’s work and esoteric, drug-aided explorations of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick…
I still think it’s the ambiguity that makes Dredd electric, though—the friction between this nightmarish prison-city policed by walking lawbooks and the fact that who the drokk wouldn’t want to see some trigger-happy lowlife get Lawgivered in the face?
By Evan Henry
When the “Marvel Age of comics” dawned in the early 1960s, the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Tsar Bomba, many of the new slew of superheroes embodied a politicized mutagenic anxiety surrounding the very real possibility of nuclear conflict. Throughout the decade, Lee, Kirby, Ditko, Heck, and others illustrated a bewildering array of physical monstrosities and curiosities…
Launched in 1979, digest-sized monthly comic Starblazer was Scottish publisher DC Thomson’s attempt to cash in on the science fiction craze that had dominated popular culture since the release of Star Wars. Every aspect of the visual media landscape was saturated with trippy, futuristic imagery, triggering a commercial feeding frenzy in which normally staid companies like DC Thomson were eager to participate…
A little over thirty years ago, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid limited series landed in comic shops. Gaiman, in the late 1980s probably known best for his history of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series (Don’t Panic), and his novelistic collaboration with Discworld creator Terry Pratchett…
