A few years ago, I was at a New Year’s Eve party where the TV was tuned to a Cannon Films action movie marathon. The mindless gunfire and body blows became perfect New Year’s Eve party fodder as the crowd got more and more intoxicated…
It’s one of the peculiarities of SF literature—and perhaps of genre writing in general—that the imagery generated to sell and promote it has often proved to be more visionary and transformative than the writing itself. Serious-minded SF fans are often heard complaining about this irony, claiming (not without some justification) that Star Wars, say, is not actually science fiction but rather fantasy, or just straight-up infantile dross…
When it comes to Italian genre filmmakers, Antonio Margheriti is perhaps the underdog when compared to the likes of Dario Argento, Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci. His 1963 gothic masterpiece, Castle of Blood, may be his most revered film, but it’s certainly overshadowed by the work of other Italian genre directors…
By K.E. Roberts
The Shootist is one of the greatest Westerns ever made, although it is rarely named as such. It is John Wayne’s final film, and possibly his best performance. Wayne, of course, essentially invented the on-screen American cowboy: swaggering, gritty, terse, self-contained, charming, relentless, invincible…
The lure of eternal youth is itself seemingly eternal. Myths like the Philosopher’s Stone, the Fountain of Youth, the elixir vitae, and many others have lived with humanity for as long as there’s been an awareness of our own mortality. In the 1980s, several films in a row took on this idea of the elderly discovering a supernatural wellspring…
As the nuclear crisis between the Western powers and the Eastern Bloc deepened, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Doomsday Clock stood at four minutes to midnight, perplexed children across Great Britain were treated to the release of When the Wind Blows, a graphic novel by British artist Raymond Briggs that narrated the aftermath of a nuclear attack from the perspective of the Bloggses, a working-class couple who have recently retired to the country…
The Golden Girls premiered on American television’s NBC network in September of 1985. The sitcom features four women—Dorothy and Sophia Petrillo, Rose Nylund, and Blanche Devereaux—who are older, single, and living together as friends in the popular retirement locale of Miami, Florida…
The final episode of a post-apocalyptic comic thriller by writer-illustrator Łukasz Kowalczuk!
Three of the five ads above were illustrated by Ryo Ohshita, who seems to have specialized in depicting the pioneering audio systems of the time. Clearly taking after one of the most sought-after futurist illustrators of the decade, Shusei Nagaoka, Ohshita’s shimmering visions lend his products an occult grandeur and mystery reminiscent of the hovering Monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
In 1979, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel named Jim Channon completed a manual for a proposed new kind of armed forces division: one impelled by a mission of peace and manned by a new kind of soldier. Channon spent two years in the aftermath of the Vietnam War gathering information about the burgeoning late-’70s human potential movement…
We Are the Mutants 