Really? No love for Kunstler's work for The Omega Man?

Now we come to the end of this road - 1978, the year that I graduated from college, got married, moved out of my parents' house and started working in the field I'm still in. That's a lot for one year, but I still bought some SF magazines in the first half of the year.











Thanks for giving me an excuse to revisit a different corner of my past!

Starstream (1976) was Whitman's criminally underrated (and short-lived) series which adapted several sci-fi & fantasy stories from some of the most celebrated and/or bestselling sci-fi/fantasy authors of the 20th century, including Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Larry Niven, John W. Campbell, Jr., Dean Koontz, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Bloch and others.

Among the comic talents behind the adaptations were Jack Sparling, Nevio Zaccara, Arnold Drake, Alberto Giolitti, Steve Skeates, Alden McWilliams, George Kashdan, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, et al. ...but lets not forget the covers!



Top row: #1 (L) by Richard Powers, #2 (R) by Ron Miller.
Bottom row: #3 (L) by Alfred Jarnow, #4 (R) by Kees Romer.

I remember so many of these titles and a few of the specific issues. Although I had a lot of them a decade or more after publication. I think my buying was based on seeing certain author names. The only artists whose covers might sell me an issue I otherwise would've passed up were Hannes Bok and Kelly Freas. Maybe Wendy Pini too, but she didn't really do all that many covers, though what she did do was great. Muscley barbarians and naked women would tend to repel me though unless I saw the name of a favorite author behind the story illustrated that I could trust to make it different. Definitely an Analog regular here. I did have the first couple years of Asimov's digest, must've been those sideburns! Later they had M. Whelan and G. Barr covers I liked too though. My older brother was the one that got my Mom and I reading paperback SF I guess, but I was the only one who went for the magazines. He went off to stuff like Piers Anthony and Stephen R. Donaldson, long long series with magic and fantasy, and I preferred single stories and short stories with lots of sf ideas to think about after.

I have a couple in French (including La Forge de Vulcan) they're good old-fashioned mainstream kids' adventure books.  They're a bit dated in style but amusing enough.  Yoko Tsuno has the page turning derring-do of Tintin but in a more SF orientated world.  The stories are set contemporaneously in that Yoko lives in 1970s Paris but after a few pages slides into adventures in exotic places.