70s Sci-Fi Art

Spherical Red Aliens

I received one of my occasional requests a while back, from someone trying to track down a 70s paperback cover illustration. The description? It featured "creatures (Martians) in the shape of red balls with very long arms and very thin legs." I put out the call on my

Blue Skies

The alien planets that retro science fiction cover artists tend to feature in their landscapes are often weird colors: Trees don't always have to be green and water doesn't have to be blue. Other artworks, however, retain the comforting, natural colors of Earth. Sometimes, adding a

Gas Masks

Gas masks are pretty universally accepted as creepy. More importantly, they have a unique appearance, which is all a cover artist really needs to turn them into a visual trope. For science fiction in particular, gas masks tend to crop up in two main contexts: Protection in a post-apocalypse setting,

Medieval Computers

The kids are into medieval stuff these days. Memes, playlists, mall wizard tiktoks. A social media brand strategist just mentioned "medieval vibes" as a visual trend in a recent interview. A lot of those medieval vibes come with a little 80s-era retro flavor, which adds the extra candy-coating

Colorful Spaceships

I found this 1976 Tim White illustration the other day. It's called 'Enemy Within the Skull' and this particular image was scanned by my art blogger friend Martin L Kennedy, from the 1981 collection The Science Fiction and Fantasy World of Tim White. I was going

Angus McBride

Angus McBride's illustrations always go above and beyond. His subject matter is pretty standard-issue high fantasy and history – he's best known for his cover artworks for Middle Earth Role-Playing (MERP), the first officially licensed JRR Tolkien RPG. While I typically prefer my fantasy art to look

Alien Landscapes

The list of subject matter for book cover art that's universally acknowledged by '70s-'80s publishing art directors to scream "science fiction" is incredibly short: 1) spaceships 2) planets 3) alien landscapes As a result, the quality and volume of commercial illustrations for those

Break Time

In my last email, I said the topic for this next one would be "medieval computers" – I planned on showcasing a 80s/90s retro tech magazine illustration trend for combining the then-cutting edge personal computer with medieval and fantasy themes. But it turns out that I really needed

'Epic' Sci-Fi Art

As you might have noticed from the last few issues, I like using this newsletter to package up tiny, bizarre sub-sets of the much wider retro sci-fi art world. Challenging myself to spend an entire newsletter on something as silly as illustrations of giant teeth or fantastical crucifixions keeps me

Self Portraits

I really enjoy tracking down self-portraits from retro sci-fi artists. Plenty of artists get around to doing a self portrait. Many of these capture some subjective element of how the artist sees themself, or at least how the artist wants others to see themself. I just looked up the French

Giant Bees and Wasps

Someone on Tumblr recently asked me if I knew about an old sci-fi magazine cover featuring guys with guns riding on giant bees. They thought the artist was Virgil Finlay, and they were right. I had actually never seen this one before, but with a little research, I can now

Newsletter

The Adventures of Starbeem and Re-Koil

Here's one of the rare "semi-exclusive-by-virtue-of-obscurity" artworks that I can occasionally reveal in this newsletter. It's one of Edward A. Skrocki's 1967 illustrations for "The Adventures of Starbeem and Re-Koil," written by D. J. Donovan. Full image here: Someone I

Giant Teeth

When it comes to giant teeth in retro science fiction cover art, all conversations must begin (and will basically also end) with Piers Anthony's Prostho Plus. This 1971 comic space opera combines several magazine stories from 1967-1970, all featuring a dentist who does dental work for aliens. The

The legacy of Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead”

Between 1880 and 1886, Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin painted five versions of his most famous work, “Isle of the Dead.” They all feature a small island holding tombs and cypress trees between rocky cliffs, with a rock wall. A white-shrouded figure stands in a rowboat, nearing the island and the

Giuseppe Festino's 'Robot' Covers

Through the magic of Google Translate, I'm pleased to bring you a catalog of every issue of the Italian sci-fi magazine Robot, which ran its first series of 40 issues from April 1976 to August 1979, and is still running the second series, which launched in 2003. It

1980s Maplin Catalogues

Maplin Electronics, an electronics retailer in the UK and Ireland, has a storied history of print publications, operating its own magazine from 1980-2002, alongside various projects, handbooks, and indices. Its chunky annual catalogues may have been the core publication though, offering endless computer or synthesizer parts for geeky 80s kids

Very Normal Houses

I stumbled onto this the other day: You can find a lot more about this particular artwork for the original Zork text adventure game over here. Apparently it's "famously disliked by the developers because they felt it misrepresented their game," but it does get one element

Marius van Boordt

Last August, someone reached out to me looking for information about a long-lost bedroom poster from their 1980s childhood in NSW, Australia. All they had to go on was one muddy picture of it: I didn't recognize it, and none of my guesses panned out – it reminded me

Frankenstein art

Frankenstein's monster kickstarted the science fiction genre, so it's no wonder he's a presence in retro sci-fi art. And, thanks to 1930s-50s monster movies, he has a built-in visual archetype: Green skin, a head that's flat on top, and Boris Karloff'

Terry Oakes, "Nocturne"

Welsh artist Terry Oakes is known for 1980s-era horror cover art, as well as a solid amount of science fiction and fantasy covers – I included two of his artworks in Worlds Beyond Time. He's still working today, and his agent Jane Frank just emailed out his most recent

Extended Edition: Sea Life out of Water

Here's the last entry that failed to make it into my art book Worlds Beyond Time. I hoped to get four images in this spread, but I couldn't get in touch with Peter Goodfellow or Una Woodruff, and the cost for licensing John Berkey was a

Extended Edition: Kirby meets Kubrick

I've found Jack Kirby's comic book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey to be a fascinating oddity ever since I learned about it, so when I was putting together my art book proposal in 2019, it made the list. Most of Worlds Beyond Time focuses on

Extended Edition: Floating Cities

This entry would have gone in my book's "Life in the Future(s)" chapter, right after the Domed Cities spread. However, the artists I wanted to include either couldn't be tracked down (Feibush and Dollens), asked for more compensation than I could justify (Lund)

Extended Edition: Future Sports

This art book section was cut from Worlds Beyond Time due to a lack of art permissions – Out of the four images that I had planned for my entry on sporting events of the future, I was only able to get the permissions to use one of them. I wanted

Paid-members only

Newsletter

A hidden trove of Virgil Finlay art