Friday, April 17, 2009

1976 Village Voice Trek article

(Click images to view full-size.)

Scanned from the clipping of the February 2, 1976 issue of the Village Voice newspaper. The article itself is a silly piece of psuedo-intellectualism, which I recognised even then, but a Star Trek article of any type was worth saving, and this one, when read between the lines, gave a nice look into the convention scene at the time. I lived in Ft. Lauderdale FL at the time I found this, and a Trek item was the only reason I would pick up a copy of this rag.



Bonus content: The covers of the Trek books have many times yielded memorable artwork over the years, and Bob Larkin was one of my all-time favorite book and magazine cover illustrators. Many of the best monster magazine covers came from him and I treasure each one in my collection. The one below is a scan of the cover of "Vulcan!" (presumably shouted when said out loud) published in 1978.


The ants at Vulcan picnics are slightly more aggressive than the Earth variety.

And below is the cover art alone... nice!

5 comments:

Jay said...

Ooooooh! Pretty! I am loving that cover artwork, sir. If you run across more of that, please feel free to post it liberally!

I generally was not too crazy about most of the Bantaam-era novels, but I do love the artwork, and I think I have a copy of nearly every edition of them in which the artwork was different. Sort of like collecting baseball cards :) I remember as a kid always nitpicking all the little costume and tech errors that crept into those covers, but as an adult, I have complete appreciation for them and the very pulp-ish 40s' & '50s sci-fi quality they have. The ray guns, the giant ants, the whole magilla. They're just fun to look at, and its fun to see beloved Star Trek characters in artwork that harkens back to a different era.

I'll hop back on my coffe table book soapbox and say that I'd also be happy to pony up money for a big book that reproduced the artwork for all those Bantaam novels. I dunno what the problem is - I keep offering to pay people cold hard cash for stuff that no one's taking me up on ;)

Frederick said...

Jay,

Perhaps you should try to get a job at one of the major book publishers as a Trek-fan liason, to develop books that would sell well to trkkers! :)

We could put out some jam-up books if they'd just let us call the shots!

The Nostalgic Gangsta said...

That Vulcan cover art is amazing!
hanks for posting it.
I sure do miss the days of magazines and novels with fully painted cover art. The covers for the Trek books these days are disgusting. Nothing more than photoshopped stills composites.

Frederick said...

Gangsta,

So true, and also for many of the genre mags... the covers painted on Famous Monsters, Monsters of the Movies, etc. were works of art back in the day, now most mags are just photos.

And the Trek books are plain unattractive any more. I suppose it's because there are so many, it's a whole lot cheaper to PS soemthing together than commission an artist like they used to.

I'll be posting more of my favorite old covers in the future!

Jay said...

I have a whole book of Basil Gogos art, including a lot of the colorfully vivid stuff he painted for Famous Monsters.

And, yes, its on my coffee table. I'm not kidding about that stuff.