'Heavy Metal' magazine September 1981
The front cover of the September 1981 issue of 'Heavy Metal' is by Chris Achilleos. Titled 'Taarna'; it's also the poster for the movie, which was released in early August. The back cover is by Angus McKie, and is titled 'So Beautiful and So Dangerous'.
This issue is heavy on series installments. Richard Corben kicks off another series, 'Den II', and there are installments in the ongoing 'The Immortal's Fete' by Bilal, 'Cody Starbuck' by Chaykin, 'Tex Arcana' by Findley, and 'Outland' by Steranko.
'The Eye of the Goddess Isliah' by Brocol Remohi, and Juan Gimenez's 'Infantrymen ! Infantrymen !' stand out as the best of the one-shot pieces.
The various text columns that previously were given primacy by former editor Ted White have been shortened to two pages, retitled 'Dossier', and relegated to the back pages of the magazine. I've posted the Dossier below.
Needless to say, Lou Stathis continues to write pretentious 'Rok' criticism, this time fawning over David Eno and Robert Fripp (those two artists were the objects of veneration for every early 80s rock critic).
But even Stathis's writing stands out as readable and coherent, compared to the two brief columns appearing alongside his.
A review of the novels of Robert Anton Wilson by Philip Jose Farmer, and a 'Quick Takes' review of 'The Raiders of the Lost Ark' by one Daphne Davis (?), both engage in such slavish imitation of William Burroughs's prose style that they unintentionally sink into parody.....
Posted below is the latest episode in Steranko's 'Outland'.
I recently read the first Riverworld book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go and thought it was pretty good. The adventure stuff is good, and the setting and characters are interesting. Farmer inflicts some of his banal opinions about sex, the death penalty, various Victorian personages, the environment and religion on the reader, but that doesn't overshadow the book's virtues.
ReplyDeleteI read several of the Riverworld books in my teens (I'm 40 now) and recall that the later ones are weak, so I may not be reading any more of them. A few weeks ago I read Farmer's Maker of Universes and it was pretty weak, which did not make me more eager to read further in the Riverworld series or any of Farmer's oeuvre.
And I like quite a lot of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's work, though of the mentioned pieces I am only really familiar with No Pussyfooting. When I was riding MetroNorth between Manhattan and Westchester County and the guy next to me was listening to loud music I would listen to No Pussyfooting, which was loud enough to drown out the other guy's noise but simple enough that it did not distract me from my reading or my napping.