Odds and Ends: June 2026

Three new limited-run John Berkey prints went on sale recently. Granted, they're not cheap: Each of these will cost $300.

They're beautiful, though! I particularly like the first one I'm including here.

And no, I'm not being paid to promote them! But, hey, if you sell art prints and you want to pay me to talk about them... get in touch, we'll talk.

I'm not sure why depicting your electronics as space debris was so popular in the 80s, but here's a 1983 Jameco Electronics catalog cover that I missed back when I did my space trash roundup.

I was just thinking about how much the Batman villian Two-Face feels like a Dick Tracy villian the other day. So, I Googled around and found out that there is a bit of a connection: Tracy creator Chester Gould ripped off Two-Face for a character in 1966 that he called "Haf-and-Haf."

Pretty much all the information about the character is from either this 2018 Blogspot post or this 2010 LiveJournal post (from a blog dedicated to Two-Face specifically).

They also link to this autobiographical comic by Jay Lynch that I enjoyed.

Here's an interesting art swipe from speculative fiction history: The anti-D&D booklet Dungeons & Dragons: Witchcraft, Suicide, Violence swiped and flipped an interior illustration from Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons.

Stu Horvath at Vintage RPG revealed this in a recent newsletter. The proof:

My art blogger friend Deep Thot has uncovered a real treasure trove of '90s Pog art online.

Here are some incredible 1995 examples from a set of 40 Australian Looney Tunes ones.

The website has a lot more, from Goosebumps to Dungeons and Dragons. Since they're all circular, any of them could make a great profile pic.

A quick follow-up to my Paintings of Paintings post, featuring two more examples that go together as a pair: Ogden Whitney's Nov-Dec 1962 cover to Forbidden Worlds, followed by a cartoon from André François.

Both of these are from art blogger ‪La vida en viñetas‬.

Stan Watts' 1988 US box art for Datasoft's Time and Magik wouldn't quite fit into my time machine post, but I don't have the patience to build up a "melting clock faces" post.

Speaking of melting clock pictures, I just saw a source that credited the Twilight Zone example from last month to the huge Twilight Zone cover artist George Wilson who did nearly all the other covers in that post.

Anyway, I just thought this one was cool. He snuck his name "S Watts" onto the center of the clock, as noted by OriginalVideoGameArt over here.

‪Bill Higgins on Bluesky has a follow-up to my post on polar bear-drawn sleighs: Apparently the Frazetta illustration popped up where you wouldn't expect.

USA TODAY reporter Davis Winkie was talking about a big story he did on missile silos, and said that the most interesting thing that didn't make the cut was that he "spent probably two hours on the Library of Congress site flipping through photos taken of the murals painted in ICBM-related facilities at Grand Forks AFB. There were some really cool ones, like this Viking riding a sled pulled by polar bears."

Neither the government nor Winkie notes that this is a Frazetta rip-off, but we here at 70s Sci-Fi Art are happy to confirm that it totally is.

Higgins further notes that the artist is one Mike Decker in the 1980s and that "the common theme of 'stuff you don't want to see coming at you from across the North Pole' makes this mural appropriate for a missile silo door."

I'm not doing my normal "cool links" section, but I do have a podcast recommendation - I think I linked to an episode of the Comic Book Couples Counseling podcast a while back when I first found them, and it has since sucked me in. They're very charming podcasters, thoughtful interviewers, and they cover comic books, a medium that still flies under the pop-culture radar compared to novels or film.

Anyway, here's an episode where Daniel Freedman talk about his graphic novel short story collection Stimulus, which I hadn't heard of, but have since checked out - it's really cool! I think any fans of retro science fiction art would enjoy it.

Here's a panel from the opening story, by artist Robert Sammelin, featuring a seemingly Syd Mead-influenced decadent space station party.

Music Rec: Sweeps - Mirage

Next Time: Paying users get my notes on the 2008 essay collection Paint or Pixel: The Digital Divide in Illustration Art