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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Along with Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and several ancient monoliths attributed to ancient astronauts in Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968), Stonehenge became a symbol of occult mystery in the 1970s…
As the 20th century grew more precarious, humans often found comfort in the idea of incorporating “superior” technology into their all-too-fragile flesh and blood…
We Are the Mutants 