POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Welcome To The Zany World Of 1970s Sci-Fi Art
By Dan Brown I lived through the 1970s so you don’t have to, kids! But seriously. Regardless of how old you are, you should check out the art book Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, which was published this summer. It will have special resonance if you are a Gen Xer like me who remembers the paperback and magazine covers of old. If you were a fan of writers Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, or Michael Moorcock, you’ll grok this hefty collection of paintings. But even if you have no memories of the Me Decade, you can still learn a lot about today’s science-fiction aesthetic because many of these images still linger in the public imagination. Keep in mind this was a time when painters and illustrators had to summon depictions of spaceships, astronauts and aliens largely from whole cloth i.e. their minds. The artists represented here did have the benefit of the work done in the early decades of the century, but the genre wasn’t as ubiquitous then as it is today. There was no internet repository they could summon with a few taps on the keyboard. Nor flashy video games And yes, I got this book because it has huge nostalgia appeal for me. Born in the 1960s, I grew up in the 1970s. It was a magic time because that’s when I got my first taste of sci-fi literature. Editor Adam Rowe wisely divides the artistic output from the decade into understandable sections like spaceships, alien life, and landscapes. He then subdivides each of these broad categories into themes that recurred throughout the decade – UFOs, space cats, robots, et cetera. Individual artists – think John Berkey, Angus McKie, Boris Vallejo, and others – likewise get their own spotlight page or two. This allows Rowe to present a 222-page showcase that gives even newbie readers an accurate feel for the times. You might be wondering about movie posters, since this was the decade that saw Star Wars create an overnight explosion in interest for space fantasy. One subsection, titled Star Wars before Star Wars, collects the works that presaged George Lucas’ saga, including hairy creatures that look an awful lot like wookies and four-legged walking tanks originated by Syd Mead. There’s also strong representation of paintings originally done as covers for such Warren publications as Creepy. In short, this is a delightful volume. It provides a look at the body of work that serves as a bridge between the art of old and the art of today. It all went down in the 1970s. I can only hope it finds an audience among younger readers who haven’t been exposed to these pictures before, and provides compelling evidence that no one requires AI help to dream up lively visions of days to come. It’s also a nice companion piece for the art books that reproduce early Dungeons & Dragons art from roughly the same period. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Boyd’s New Graphic Memoir is so Groovy
By Dan Brown. If you’re a child of the 1970s, you’re going to love D. Boyd’s Denniveniquity. This new graphic memoir covers the years 1977 to 1980 in the comic creator’s life growing up in Saint John. Boyd, now a Montrealer, captures the Me Decade better than any other artist, on par with filmmaker Richard Linklater – the guy who directed Dazed and Confused. The book begins when button-nosed Dawn is in Grade 7. She has a crush on movie star Gene Wilder and has seen Star Wars three times. Her favourite band is Trooper. Boys like to grab her developing breasts – “WONKA WONKA!!” one yells as he assaults her in the school hallway. Her mother is relentlessly negative. “You’re too young to look so matronly,” she chides. “Boys are only going to want one thing from you.” The book follows Dawn as she navigates each new grade. There are moments of glee, as when classmate Robbie Allen calls her on the phone at home. And moments of frustration: “Isn’t there anything I’m good at?” she wonders after failing to master downhill skiing. Denniveniquity rewards close reading. Each panel is carefully crafted to reinforce the feel of the era in which Dawn grows up. If, like me, the first full decade you lived through was the 1970s, this book is going to be a thrill. Boyd packs each panel with detail. There’s an April Wine T-shirt. A scene at a Trooper concert (there’s also a discussion of the proper way to pronounce lead singer Ra McGuire’s first name). Keen-eyed readers will also spot a reference to Meco’s galactic funk on the back of a newspaper page. Farrah Fawcett-Majors gets a mention, as do TV shows like Soap and Grizzly Adams, and the Hamilton band Teenage Head. It was the decade of faux wood panelling on station wagons, Participaction, KMart, Joe Clark, Jimmy Carter, the Amityville Horror, and Fotonovels. In one explosive splash panel, as the New Year’s countdown approaches and 1980 beckons, Dawn sees the pop culture of her childhood flash before her eyes. “Wow, the ’70s are over,” she marvels. “That was most of my childhood.” And, of course, Dawn gets drunk for the first time by invading her parents’ liquor cabinet in the basement bar. Nor can her young mind understand the unwritten rules of friendship and dating. “Whatever I like about him seems to be the same thing I hate about him,” she says of her on-again, off-again boyfriend Nick. But more than getting the specifics of the 1970s in Canada right, Denniveniquity nails the sensation of how time passes for a young person. Boyd pulls this off by omitting clunky transitions, just as the developing brain does. She glides effortlessly from one scene to the next, and the reader never feels something is missing. It all makes sense. The only other comic creator who was able to do the same as masterfully is Gilbert Hernandez with his childhood recollections in Marble Season. Denniveniquity covers some of the same ground as Boyd’s 2019 book Chicken Rising, but don’t let that deter you. It is also published by the East Coast’s Conundrum Press. I give it my highest recommendation. This book belongs in the same conversation as Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer, Michel Rabagliati’s Paul Moves Out, and Seth’s ongoing Nothing Lasts in Palookaville. With Jeff Lemire’s new autobiography looming in July, this is shaping up to be a landmark year for graphic memoirs by Canadian comic creators! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
It’s 1975 All Over Again
By Dan Brown There’s a calendar from 1975 on my wall. Each month has a Marvel superhero on it like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor and Captain America. With this apparent antique pinned to the wall,, it’s easy for me to imagine I’ve travelled back in time to the era of Gerald Ford, Archie Bunker, bell-bottom jeans, and the fall of Saigon. To be clear, the calendar I’m talking about is actually a re-issue of the Mighty Marvel Calendar from 1975. As it turns out, some marketing genius figured out that 2025 and 1975 share the same calendar dates. I'm guessing the question then became, “Why not just put out the old one again?” The resulting calendar is a slick piece of work, fashioned from sturdy cardstock and bound with a plastic spiral. (Yes, I do have a calendar fetish, I always buy several different ones for home and office.)I say it’s brilliant marketing because it represents a huge potential return on a minimal investment. Marvel already owns all the art, plus the characters featured each month have only become more popular in the intervening decades. As well, 1970s nostalgia is all the rage these days. Aided by the Mighty Marvel Calendar for 1975/2025, let’s imagine it is January 50 years ago, shall we? So what was going on back then? Here in the Forest City, Jane Bigelow was the first female mayor of London. Our nation’s economy was reeling from an ongoing energy crisis.Nicknamed “gas guzzlers,” cars were the size of boats. Compact, fuel-efficient vehicles looked to be a growth industry, yet these Japanese imports were still the subject of ridicule. In the early months of 1975, there was talk of how the motion-picture adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-selling Jaws paperback had turned into a troubled production. Besides, who went to movies in the summer anyways? Speaking of pulpy sensations, people could still not believe that a crime family had been portrayed on the silver screen as people with regular personalities in The Godfather and its 1974 sequel. It was almost like these movies were saying criminals have a lot in common with ordinary human beings, a shocking concept. A string of dystopian sci-fi flicks mirrored the zeitgeist – when people in 1975 looked into the future, it wasn’t a pretty picture. The Star Trek animated Saturday-morning cartoon from the early 1970s hadn’t done much to spread Gene Roddenberry’s idea of a utopian future society. On the radio in early 1975, you didn’t hear Elvis Presley much anymore. The airwaves belonged to acts like Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, the born-again Bob Dylan and an upstart by the name of Bruce Springsteen. Could he be the future of rock and roll? As for comics, well, they were for kids – though creators like Will Eisner insisted comic books should be taken seriously as a form of literature, even with their cheap paper and splotchy colours. About this time in January of 1975, DC jacked the price of individual comic books up to a quarter from 20 cents. That summer, Marvel would offer a new team of Uncanny X-Men to readers, including a short Canadian mutant with metal for bones who had originally been the villain in a Hulk storyline. In the letters columns of those bygone Marvel comics, readers made their desire known: Somehow, sometime, someway, Marvel heroes had to make the jump to the big screen.Why, one correspondent even argued, Charlton Heston would make a perfect Magneto.Do you miss the 1970s? Do you wish you had been alive back then? Let me know in the comment box below! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
The Next Big Marvel Fad Is Here
By Dan BrownI’m not one to say comics were better when I was a boy – they weren’t better, they were just different.That said, I do miss the desperate attempts by the editors at Marvel Comics to cash in on the latest trend, whether it be kung fu or black power or disco music.I miss the slapdash efforts to tap into the collective consciousness from the folks at the House of Ideas whenever the Next Big Thing came along in the 1970s and early 1980s.You don’t see that much in today’s comics.What I’m talking about are the weird, wonderful books like Marvel Premiere No. 50, which came out in 1979 and featured shock rocker Alice Cooper.That’s right: Along with Captain America, Spider-Man and the rest, the then-edgy Alice Cooper was once a Marvel protagonist.You can imagine the wishful thinking: Cooper was selling a pile of albums and had generated a lot of buzz with his at-the-time outrageous stage shows, so the brain trust running the firm likely figured gangbuster sales would follow if they slapped Alice’s name on a comic. That may also be why comics and characters prompted by popular trends were mostly half-ass affairs.The creative team had to get them onto stands quickly, since by the time retailers reported sales figures back, the newest mania could be over.Nor was Cooper the first musician to appear in the pages of a Marvel adventure: Gene Simmons and the guys from KISS likewise showed up in the magazine-size publication Marvel Super Special No. 1, which landed in 1977.But the ultimate example of cashing in on a musical craze had to be Dazzler, the mutant who had the powers of . . . a disco ball. She first appeared in 1980’s Uncanny X-Men No. 130. You won’t be surprised to learn the mutant superhero team discovered her in a chic New York nightclub a la Studio 54. Having her debut in the pages of one of the brand’s most popular titles didn’t hurt, and the character went on to have a comic of her own for five years, thus outliving the music genre that spawned her.If it was hot, Marvel tried to jump on it. When martial-arts films featuring Bruce Lee drew audiences to movie theatres, the company responded with heroes Shang-Chi and Iron Fist, who chopped with their hands and kicked with their feet. Giving a new character the unsubtle name Power Man, as well as promoting Black Panther to headline his own series, were part of Marvel’s play for black readers. With real-life daredevil Evel Knevel generating headlines in the 1970s, the storied company answered with a stuntman of their own, the Human Fly. Shogun Warriors was aimed at fans of giant Japanese robots.When the Marvel team couldn’t secure the rights to The Lord of the Rings, they created their own fantasy world in Warriors of the Shadow Realm. Heck, Spider-Man even joined forces with the original cast of Saturday Night Live in Marvel Team-Up No. 74 in 1978. And it got sillier. In 1982, the latest to become a Marvel superhero was . . . the Pope. John Paul II made his comic debut in a biographical issue called The life of Pope John Paul II. “The entire story!” the cover blared. “From his childhood in Poland to the assassination attempt!” I’m sure kids everywhere were thrilled.Of course, if you do enough of these fad-based comics, eventually one will catch fire. And that’s just what happened in the mid-1970s when Marvel got the rights to a virtually unknown sci-fi property called Star Wars.It was arguably the smartest move in Marvel history, because the title became a massive seller. There were millions upon millions of us hungering for Star Wars content, of which there was little apart from Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye novel and Brian Daley’s Han Solo trilogy. Smarter people than me have argued how, without the Star Wars licence, the company might not have survived into the 1980s.I guess you could say there is one fad that Marvel editors have been trying to milk for the last 20 years, which is the popularity of the movies and TV shows based on Marvel characters. They’ve taken a hero like Samuel L. Jackon’s Nick Fury from the movies and projected him into their comics, erasing the original cigar-chomping Second World War stalwart.But apart from driving up the price of back issues, I’m not sure big-screen adaptations have done much for the sales of the comics themselves, which is both odd and sad.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
