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Oct 23

Tom Mix Seal of Approval!Click for larger image

Wendy Comments: Open wide and say “WHAAAAAA?????”

Published 1971

Actually, that cover IS a classical work of art!I would touch it without protective gloves.I've seen worse. Far, far, worse.Interesting, but I would still read it in public.Middlng: Neither awful nor awfully goodWould not like to be seen reading that!Awful... just awful...That belongs in a gold-lame picture frame!Gah... my eyes are burning! Feels so good!Good Show Sir! (Average: 8.66 out of 10)
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18 Responses to “Down in the Black Gang”

  1. THX 1139 Says:

    The Fantastic Voyage/Westworld crossover was doomed to failure.

  2. fred Says:

    I’m with Hopalong and his WTF stare on this one.

  3. FrankN.Stein Says:

    To be fair, I’m sure many a reader has made a similar facial expression while reading Farmer… 🙂

  4. Francis Boyle Says:

    Gawd, not again.

    Yes, we get it UAI graduates. You’d really like a blowjob. But face it, you’re in the wrong business.

    You should’ve tried rock’n’roll.

  5. JuanPaul Says:

    “Eww, gag me with a rocket! This cover is totally gross!”

  6. Tat Wood Says:

    To be fair, a trip to the Isle of Wight is actually very like that.

  7. B. Chiclitz Says:

    This phallic-rocket-in-babe’s-mouth trope has been used before, in case you needed a reminder.

  8. Anna T. Says:

    I think that is the face I’d make if I was about to be unavoidable stabbed in the mouth with a dagger concealed in a plastic straw.

    It’s amazing how many covers on this site are so strange we wind up typing sentences we’ve never used before.

  9. Ray P Says:

    It reminds me of a rocket-shaped ice lolly I enjoyed as a child

  10. Bibliomancer Says:

    Meanwhile, Birdman is being totally ignored doing his levitating egg trick.

  11. GSS ex-noob Says:

    Now THIS is GSS-worthy. WTFery at its finest.

    I cannot blame either the damsel or Tom Mix* for their expressions. It’s what we’re all thinking, though at least we only have to look at the cover instead of be on it.

    Also not sure why a male bird person is wearing an egg on his chest.

    @Anna: So true. I’ve typed sentences here that I never would have imagined using in my wildest fever dreams. Sentences I wouldn’t have thought could exist.

    Yay SFBC, without which we’d have so many fewer entries.

    *And now we know where Pharrell got his hat from.

  12. THX 1139 Says:

    Not so much scale and polish, more fail and demolish.

  13. Bruce A Munro Says:

    A very uninformative cover. At least the one from the 18th communicated that there was a big planet with hot women on it. This mentions a “black gang”, and the chap with the cowboy hat might belong to some group of deperados with poor fashion sense, but why would one be “down” in such a gang? Is it a metaphorical gang, or some sort of grouping by attributes rather than actual allegiance, like “the criminal element?”

    Rockets show up on SF covers with the grim regularity of badly posed women in urban fantasy, so there’s no guarantee there actually is space travel involved, and @Francis Boyle is probably correct about it being a reference to PJF’s kinkyness rather than there being an actual giant spaceship-eating woman as might be the case on a Baen cover. So we’re left with the bird-man, and I can’t really imagine the cowboys letting him join their gang. I’m just going to assume that this cover is warning us “psychedelic shit ahead, yo.”

  14. Tor Mented Says:

    Hmm. I think the word “Going” is missing from the title.

  15. Tracy Says:

    OK, I own this book, and the cover is terrible. Not to mention confusing, especially for an 11-year-old girl which is how old I was when I acquired this book, which is actually a book club version not the one you’d buy off the shelf.

    BUT, the elements on the cover really do depict the stories in the anthology. There is a story featuring Tom Mix (in Riverworld.) And a story about a spaceship flying into the mouth of a giant (dead) woman. And a story about an interplanetary anthropologist-priest who lives among bird people, wearing a disguise, and has an egg implanted on his chest. The latter two stories are quite good. I don’t know about the Tom Mix one. I was never a fan of Farmer’s Riverworld series.

    Still, I would not be caught dead in public with this cover.

  16. A.R.Yngve Says:

    When I sat in my dentist’s waiting room, I happened to see this book cover among the old magazines… and I knew that I had to get another dentist. Or something TERRIBLE might happen.

  17. anon Says:

    They saw the words ‘black gang’ and thought of THIS?

  18. A.R.Yngve Says:

    Not ANOTHER phony Coronavirus “cure”!

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