Giant People

I mostly picked this theme because I really love the image below.

It's Howard V. Brown's cover art for the June 1924 issue of Scientific American, depicting "The world in miniature: Model makers at work on a huge relief map."

In other words, it's not science fiction!

That said, Brown was already illustrating science fiction machinery during this time, for magazines like Science and Invention and Radio News. He would soon establish himself as a top pulp magazine artist, with inventive alien designs and creative scenarios across the 1930s and early 1940s (I wrote a little bit about him here).

For this cover, it looks like Brown intentionally leaned into the surreal possibilities behind a couple unassuming workers casually constructing an entire landscape, leaving out details that would break the illusion, like a ceiling or floor.

I think this is my favorite Brown illustration! Sadly, I don't think I can justify including it on my new science fiction art book, since it's not in the genre, but it got me thinking about giant people in sci-fi, so I found a use for it in this post.

And if any of you want to do anything else with it, go for it! It's public domain!

Frank Kelly Freas has plenty of great depictions of giant people, like this creepy one for the 1973 cover to The Telzey Toy by James Schmitz.

Freas had already illustrated the January 1971 cover of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, where it seems that same story was first serialized.

This story appears to actually be a case of tiny people, not giant people.

This one's giant, but not people: Alex Stevens' September 1981 cover to Microcomputing Magazine features a big robot tromping across a network of bike paths.

Of course, I could probably do an entire post about giant robots specifically. Here's one from Chris Foss, for a 1978 cover to Isaac Asimov's The Bicentennial Man.

One last giant robot: Anton Kurka's queasy cover art for IF magazine's January 1953 issue, depicting the "Ultimate Re-Sowing of The Human Race, 4000 AD." Upsetting!

Josh Kirby’s 1972 cover art for The Mind Behind the Eye, by Joseph Greene, is reminicent of the Lilliputians from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels – an early icon of giant people fiction.

No artist is credited for this 1964 cover to Day of the Giants, by Lester del Rey.

Reynold Brown's 1964 movie poster for The Time Travelers has an impressive threatening giant.

An alien giant graces Jack Gaughan's 1965 cover for Paingod and Other Delusions, a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison.

Karel Thole’s 1978 cover illustrating the J. G. Ballard short story “The Drowned Giant” is a really interesting one.

It's a complement to my favorite Thole artwork (and one of his most well-known, thanks in part to Vincent Di Fate including it as a frontispiece for his art collection Infinite Worlds), his 1970 cover to Howard Fast's The General Zapped an Angel.

This uncredited 1970 cover to Virgin Planet, by Poul Anderson, appears to be opting for a surrealist take. The title centers on a male astronaut who lands on a planet populated entirely by women, but just the normal-sized kind. On this cover, though, the woman has grown as large as her societal role in the story.

Ed Emshwiller has a beautiful 1959 cover to Giants from Eternity, by Manly Wade Wellman, where a massive etherial bug alien stalks the skyline.

The "giants" of the title are actually great scientists from history, who are brought back to deal with a living alien blight that's engulfing the Earth, The Blob-style.

Emshwiller's alien monster doesn't really match that blob-like alien and it's certainly not a historic scientist, but there's no denying that it is a giant and that the book's title has the word "giant" in it.

Those are all the giants I could dig up with a quick search, so I'll stop here, but I have no doubt that there are dozens of additional examples. I didn't even get to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman!

I'll probably return to this theme again. At the very least, I should do a follow up covering the tiny, shrunken adventurers from science fiction history, along with their various safety-pin spear skirmishes with spiders, scorpions, and snakes.

Cool Link

Strip Law season 2 megadoc clips

Here's my belated recommendation that you check out the now-cancelled Netflix cartoon Strip Law. It brings no meaning to the word "madcap" and yes, I meant to say "no," not "new" – if you watch more than two episodes in a row, your brain will drip out your ears. That's a compliment.

Anyway, this link is a list of behind-the-scenes episode ideas for season two, as shared online by series creator Cullen Crawford now that it won't happen.

Meet the Publisher: Decadence Comics - CHART

I'm looking into trying to get an illustration by Stathis Tsemberlidis (namely the wraparound cover of this book) into my upcoming art collection. Here's an interview he did in 2023 about the indie comics publishing company he cofounded. Seems like a cool guy.

Capturing Jurassic Park - One Sensational Shot

Here's a fun breakdown of Spielberg's Jurassic Park shot compositions.

One for all my fellow film freaks who love reading sentences like "The shot has three parts: an opening, in which the threat is introduced; an event, in which the threat is confirmed; and a climax, in which the confirmed threat creates a response, escalating the tension and progressing the action."

Music Rec: Interstellar - A Trip Hop Mix

Next Time: Alan Gutierrez (paid subs only!)