When Punk Was Meant to Hurt You: Penelope Spheeris’ ‘The Decline of Western Civilization’

Early in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene, she asks Eugene, a 14-year-old skinhead who talks like a Valley kid, what he likes about punk. “It’s like, it’s not bullshit,” he responds. “There’s no rock stars now, you know?” It’s to the director’s credit that the next hour and a half, elapsing with the speed and eloquence of an autobahn car crash, both proves and refutes that answer…

‘Warrior’ Comics Magazine, 1982 – 1985

Edited by Yorkshireman Dez Skinn—the self-styled “British Stan Lee”—and published by his company Quality Communications, Warrior was a 26-issue British comic featuring work by both well-known and up-and-coming artists and writers…

Rainier Beer Advertisement, 1976

This 1976 promotional poster for Rainer beer, entitled “Barbeerian [sic] conquers Sasquatch” and showing a muscular warrior serving the mythical creature the beverage, demonstrates that high fantasy and cryptozoological tropes had penetrated the popular culture of the second half of the 20th century to such an extent that they could be reliably mined for mainstream parody…

Sublime Pulp: An Interview with Illustrator Les Edwards

By Richard McKenna

It would be nice to say that Les Edwards needs no introduction, but it might be more accurate to say that he should need no introduction. Despite the vast influence his work has exerted upon science fiction, horror, and fantasy illustration over the last forty-odd years, he remains perhaps less well-known than he deserves outside the battlements of genre art…

Electronic Voice Phenomena Investigation, 1973

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea of contacting spirits and ghosts using the new technologies created in the fields of sound reproduction and transmission grew out of the fertile ground of the Spiritualist movement…

Fontana’s Regional Horror Anthologies, 1968 – 1976

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…

Jack Chick Was Right: How ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Made Me an Occultist

By Michael M. Hughes

If you’re like me, and you played Dungeons & Dragons in the ’70s and ‘80s, then you likely encountered someone who told you you were going to Hell. Maybe your born again aunt slipped you the infamous Jack Chick pamphlet, Dark Dungeons…

How ‘The Gong Show’ Led Me to the Creepy Bleakness of 1970s Circuses

By Michael Grasso

The Circus Report, if this particular issue is indicative, was put together like an old-school zine: clip art, text laid out in a handful of different fonts, very clearly mocked up on a photocopier, and so forth. But these stories aren’t about the latest indie bands. They’re news articles about minor-league circuses in trouble for animal cruelty…

Bob Newhart Waits in Line for ‘Star Wars’, 1977

The impact the original Star Wars had on the pop cultural landscape was so huge that it created ripples reaching to the most unexpected corners…

‘Heavy Metal’ Advertisement, 1984

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…