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…
Double Exposure: ‘The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon’ and ‘House of Stairs’
By K.E. Roberts and Brother Bill
The Three Investigators series was published between 1964 and 1987, with the “Hitchcock editions” (featuring cover illustrations by Robert Adragna and Hitchcock’s shadowed profile in the top right corner) first appearing in 1978, to great success…
‘Dragon Quest’ and the Power of the Grind
By J.G. Newman
What should have been a couple-session run-through of an old RPG somehow morphed into a piecemeal, month-long slog. It’s the first “historically significant” game I’ve played that feels like a cave painting, a work enjoyable only as a first step toward things to come…
‘Xenon’ Pinball Machine, 1980
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…
Adventures in Atari BASIC: Lesson Two – Graph Paper and Pixels
In Lesson One, we learned that the first step in the execution of an Atari BASIC game is usually drawing the playfield, which had to be done pixel by pixel. We plotted 50 random stars as a start, leaving Space Assault’s playfield somewhat less than exciting. Let’s continue by drawing the game’s only weapon, the mighty Fission Gun Tower…
Unused Title Treatment for Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’, 1979
Michael Doret, a Brooklyn, New York-born illustrator and graphic designer, started working professionally in the early 1970s, and is responsible for several iconic images, including a series of Time magazine covers…
“Rabies Is a Killer” Poster, Circa 1977
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…
“By the Time I’m a Parent”: The Poignant Prophecy of Boards of Canada’s “Energy Warning”
Our bailiwick here at We Are The Mutants is the often weird pop culture of the Cold War period. From our perspective, “Energy Warning,” the eleventh track on Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada’s landmark 2002 LP Geogaddi, is an artifact of a future time. But Boards of Canada’s own artistic and indeed ontological territory is the lost, forgotten, and abandoned…
‘Land of the Lost’: An Illustrated Timeline
By Brother Bill
This timeline attempts to chronicle key events from the original Land of the Lost series, which ran for three seasons from 1974-1976. Key events include the introduction of a new character or location, any traveling through time and/or space via time doorways or other paranormal means, events that altered the geography or climate of the Land of the Lost itself…
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