Jan 15
Tom Luczycki’s Art Direction: I need a guy astride a giant walking fish-thing accompanied by a metallic angel with nippless bazooms. Could you have the guy holding an impossibly small and ineffective bow? Forget about the arrows. The bow is more a symbol for the subtext of the underlying metaphor. And moths. The moths should round things out nicely.
Published 1983
(Average: 6.87 out of 10)
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January 15th, 2018 at 10:43 am
These Tarzan knock-offs just get worse. “Butterflies – UNGAWA!”
January 15th, 2018 at 11:40 am
What do you mean phallic symbolism?
Well at least, he has nipples, so there’s that. Except no, that just makes it more screwed up.
January 15th, 2018 at 2:27 pm
The mighty compensaurus has concerns about his new rider’s personal hygiene.
January 15th, 2018 at 3:08 pm
Wrap around cover. I like intelligent aliens that actually look alien.
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/2/2e/THSGFCCKNP0000.jpg
January 15th, 2018 at 4:16 pm
That’s not how you spell ‘Cthulhu’.
January 15th, 2018 at 4:38 pm
Cuckoo doodle do.
January 15th, 2018 at 8:30 pm
It is speciesism to assume that the anorexic man is riding the space iguana when, in fact, the space iguana might have a pet anorexic on its shoulder.
January 16th, 2018 at 3:27 am
@fred: and people were talking about phallic symbolism on the _front_ cover.
January 16th, 2018 at 5:47 am
At first glance I knew this was an SFBC cover. They had a particular… style? that was unmistakable.
I wanna see this re-enacted sometime, a bit less nudely. Wonder if we could talk Lee into it. But who’d be the fish-thing
Non-papillial statue?
@fred (4): Even more scary! The black shapes over on the left look… well… what Bruce (8) said.wink nudge ew gross
@Tor (7): The critter is much larger and looks more intelligent. You have a point.
January 16th, 2018 at 6:48 am
The guy is from a low-gravity planet, obviously!
January 16th, 2018 at 10:18 am
And we all know how easy it is to stay on a giant fish without slipping off.
January 16th, 2018 at 11:10 pm
@THX: The fish-thing is obviously quite slippery, and the dude is naked, hairless, and apparently oiled-up. He ought to slide off. Magnets, maybe?
January 16th, 2018 at 11:47 pm
@GSS x-n: I prefer sheer force of will!
January 17th, 2018 at 6:20 am
@THX: Immense thigh power and/or telekinesis!
January 18th, 2018 at 10:50 am
There’s a reason why the process of evolution has never favored glowing eyes.
January 18th, 2018 at 10:52 am
You know, maybe nudity as a selling point is overrated. Like, by a factor of 10.
January 22nd, 2018 at 11:36 pm
The man’s body looks stretched out and weirdly deformed, in an overly-skinny fashion.
January 23rd, 2018 at 7:54 pm
Everything is so…shiny.
January 3rd, 2021 at 4:55 am
So I picked this one up down in Tucson, and it is FAR MORE gonzo in real life than the photos show, even the front-and-back full cover that Fred found.
Tremendously talented artist, unbelievably bizarre imagination. There must have been drugs involved in the concept and design phase. Hard drugs.
January 3rd, 2021 at 5:51 am
@fred: if you read it all those critters do exist in the text (if the ones on the back cover weren’t described as quite so, er, suggestive in shape). So it’s an artist/writer collaboration, really.
More Jack Williamson:
https://www.abebooks.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Green-Girl-Jack-Williamson.jpg
https://www.betweenthecovers.com/pictures/388521.JPG?v=1566230502
April 3rd, 2022 at 4:34 am
The gold dude riding the iguana reminds me of a serious and famous painting: Bathing the Red Horse” (1912) by Petrov-Vodkin
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bathing_of_a_Red_Horse_(Petrov-Vodkin).jpg
The revised allegorical content makes the mind reel: is the iguana now a symbol of a torpid revolution? Is the angelic statue and turbulence of the background supposed to make us think this is a mash-up with Bakst’s “Terror Antiquus”?
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terror_Antiquus_by_L.Bakst_(1908).jpg
Are the weird flying things in the lower right made out of defaulted Tsarist bonds?
So many questions….
April 4th, 2022 at 1:02 am
I doff my toque to you, Tom. Nice find! It’s pretty… awful.