“Splendido Splendente” is a post-human song before post-human was even a thing. Through the metaphor of plastic surgery, Rettore imagines a future humanity with perfect features and “pelle trasparente come un uovo di serpente” (“skin as transparent as a serpent’s egg”)…
By Eve Tushnet
The standard story of the postwar media landscape centers on the rise of television: news anchors and variety shows, cowlicked children of white couples who sleep in separate beds, the same flickering glow from every home—Donna Reed across the face of the world forever…
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…
In 1989, at the very end of the Cold War, a group of four prominent mainstream and alternative comic book writers and artists created a double volume graphic novel exposing the rampant injustices, assassinations, and terrorism facilitated by the CIA and its creatures worldwide, ostensibly to fight global communism in the years following World War II…
Steven Spielberg called Joe Dante’s 1978 Piranha “the best of the Jaws ripoffs,” but my vote goes to 1980’s Alligator, directed by Lewis Teague and distributed by Group 1 Films, the latter responsible for some memorable exploitation fare that included The Clonus Horror, UFO’s Are Real (both from 1979), and Albert Pyun’s The Sword and the Sorcerer (1980)…
By Eve Tushnet
In 1983, Lizzie Borden attacked the World Trade Center. I’m talking about Lizzie Borden the film director, and the bomb that goes off at the top of the Twin Towers is the final image of her punk feminist film Born in Flames. (It’s safe to say that the shock of the ending has not been diminished by the passage of time.)
By Jesse Walker
I can tell you the day the so-called Vietnam syndrome started to die. On November 12, 1979, four and a half years after the last American troops fled Saigon, a new single was shipped to record stores and radio stations, a ballad by the fellow who’d had a smash hit a year before with “The Gambler.”
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.”
In 1985, the first issue of an unusual new title hit the shelves of North American comic book stores. Part of Marvel Comics’ short-lived creator-owned imprint Epic, Rick Veitch’s The One stood out because its cover was an obvious visual reference to the yellow and orange concentric circles of Tide laundry detergent’s branding…
When the hippies grew up and had kids of their own, they needed something modern and self-contained to bring everyone back (occasionally this time around) to nature. Hence, the Vanagon…
We Are the Mutants 