Odds and Ends - March 2026

Here's Phil Foglio's 1983 cover for Hit or Myth, by Robert Asprin.

The model for the demon was Foglio's friend Greg Ketter, owner of Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis, who was recently photographed walking through tear gas at age 70 while protesting the ICE invasion.

The Hit or Myth anecdote comes from this 2021 Black Gate post, which further notes that characters named after Ketter have made appearances in "George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, Nick Pollata’s Satellite Night Fever, Joe Domenici’s Bringing Back the Dead, and many more."

Speaking of fascism and science fiction, check out this Hollywood Reporter interview with Andor creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy. Lots of interesting insights.

If you're not a Star Wars fan, Andor is definitely still worth watching anyway... a lot of people don't really understand facism beyond "being evil and goose-stepping." Andor captures how it's equal parts violent, pathetic, and self-destructive.

A collection of art celebrating John Carpenter's The Thing is getting reprinted this year, as a three-volume paperback, The Thing: Artbook.

One of the artists is John Coulthart, who included Jim Burns' great 1982 Bantam cover to Alan Dean Foster's novelization of the film, along with the original painting, in a blog post.

Burns isn't credited in the book or a lot of places online, so it's nice to confirm this one's his.

Coulthart says: "I can see why the art director wanted the dog removed—the cover is better with all the viewer’s attention drawn to those insectile legs—but Burns’ colour scheme is spoiled by the greenish tinge of the printed version. Ice is a difficult substance to paint well. If I was Burns I would have been a little annoyed that all those icy details had been lost."

I recently found a 1978 artwork by Gilbert Williams, a deeply new-age fantasy artist I've enjoyed for a long time – I actually looked into getting his art into Worlds Beyond Time, but he was too pricey and not fully on-theme for the book.

However, even for Williams, this hits new heights of new-ageiness. Get a load of this:

The context behind this work is key. It's being sold online, and at the link you'll find the following information:

1. It's titled "Primeval Awakening"
2. It'll cost you $37,000
3. The "history from the current owner" is this stunning sentence: "This amazing painting was in THE TEMPLE OF LOVE on Maui for years until the temple closed."
4. There's a size reference image with a dude who looks like this:

I really don't know what do with this information!

I couldn't find any info on the Temple of Love in Maui with a quick search (although there is a "Temple of Peace" – possible rebrand?) but it certainly sounds like it could be the starring location in a Hulu docu-series.

One of my most popular posts is my 2023 interview with Rick Sternbach about his artwork depicting a dolphin in a spacesuit.

I also include a roundup of other dolphins in suits in the post, and I just updated it with a new one that I recently spotted on Bluesky, posted by Ranaroth. It's by Ley Kenyon for a card on "Living underwater" from the 1974 card set "The Sea Our Other World," from Brooke Bond:

Here are the other cards from the same set, all posted by Ranaroth as well:

Here's a 15-minute YouTube essay that's a fast-paced look back at retro technology design trends: Retrotech and Product Hauntology.

Here's an odd webcomic that I'm really enjoying: Noncanon.

When we rolled into 2026, I briefly mentioned all the futuristic art relevant to the year at the end of one newsletter – it wasn't enough to dedicate an entire post to, like I did for 2025.

However! I've uncovered another one: An "October 2026" spoof of an old Frank R Paul Amazing Stories cover from 1926 featuring lobster aliens.

The image appears in Frank R Paul: Father of Science Fiction Art, 2009, edited by Stephen D. Korshak. Here's what I wrote in my notes:

In 1959, Forrest J Ackerman commissioned Paul to do a new version of an old Oct 1926 issue of Amazing Stories. Ackerman had Paul add a century to the publication date, and change the title to a pun on his own name. The “4 S J +” on the spaceship was added, too, in what I assume is another name reference.

Here's the original:

Paying subscribers can access everything in my Book Notes series over here, to get quotes, art, and summaries of a wide range of art collections.

Here are a few images that have been popular on my Tumblr recently: First, this ad for a toy from the 1983 TV miniseries V. I guess allegories for Nazism are big these days.

Wally Wood's April 1959 cover to Galaxy magazine got some much deserved love as well. This illustration's amazing, and it's definitely coming up whenever I get around to going a big post about alien hangouts. And whenever I do my smoking in sci-fi sequel post.

My favorite Tumblr comments on this artwork, in no particular order:

• "why so they look like kim kitsuragi"
• "One is smoking through his helmet, another is casually brandishing a gun. 1950s confirmed."
• "so did the artist not know how to draw ears of any kind or...."
• "i mean...i feel like having a helmet that allows you to smoke would kind of defeat the whole purpose of a helmet"
• "I don't know if the orange one is betting their gun or pulling it out of the pot to shoot that robot. I'm going to assume the latter because otherwise poor trigger discipline."
• "I'd imagine the reflections off the glass helmets would make it easy to cheat"

No one's asked why the tiny robot in the corner has a space helmet.

Cool Links

Fanfiction’s Total Cultural Victory - Defector

Lots of interesting details about fanfic here that I didn't know, and it makes Kaliane Bradley's sci-fi novel The Ministry of Time sound really cool.

“The Devil Had Worshipers Long Before Lenin”: The Occult Spy Novels of E. Howard Hunt - We Are The Mutants

"Longtime CIA operative, Nixon White House 'plumber,' and Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt penned a series of pulp spy novels in the ’60s and early ’70s under the pseudonym David St. John."

So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket - New York Times

Say goodbye to the format behind most of the art I post about in this blog: "After almost a century in wide circulation, the mass market paperback is shuffling toward extinction."

Music rec: DJ Tyboogie's 80's Hip Hop Mixtape

Next Time: Angus McKie's Modular Future