Jan 06
Don Comments: If you were surrounded by a tribble with fangs, Dennis the Menace, the girl from Season 1 of THE TOMORROW PEOPLE, a corpse, a skeletal alien, a streaker, a horse and an off-panel Robin Hood, you’d be all “WTF?!” too.
Published 1971
Many thanks to Don!
January 6th, 2011 at 8:44 am
Oh my word.
Does the font in which the title is set have a name? ‘Slab Psychedelic Serif’ perhaps?
January 6th, 2011 at 9:29 am
You see.. I always said tribbles would turn on you given the chance!
January 6th, 2011 at 10:33 am
Gah… her eyes! They are bulging!
Good to see Joanna Lumley on a cover (bottom left), but she has amazingly large hands. And surely that’s a light blue relative of Animal from the Muppet Show.
I assume there is a quiver full of arrows on the BACK cover. Good Show Sir rules specify that all loaded bows must be backed up by a full quiver.
Is this really a Freas cover? I though he had more taste, and more humour.
January 6th, 2011 at 10:34 am
I guess that’s the appropriate expression to wear if you’ve been tampered with by an alien. Not that inexplicable, really.
January 6th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
This edition is an Ace Double, with LALLIA by EC Tubb on the other side.
Here is the cover.
January 6th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
“This edition is an Ace Double, with LALLIA by EC Tubb on the other side.”
Altogether less shocking. Now I see where the got the idea for the Lloyds Building Gherkin.
January 6th, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Whoa – Recoil in horror at the cover.
Could the model for the boy have been a young John C. Reilly?
January 6th, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Perhaps her peculiar expression is, as a reaction, not so inexplicable given the implied nature of said tampering … or is that just my tortured imaginings and not any real implication?
January 6th, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Yet, it’s the patchwork colored squares that really bother me the most about this cover. So wrong.
January 6th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Is it just me or is her body tiiiiny?
January 6th, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Beat poetry version of the cover blurb, in the style of William Shatner:
The more…
the aliens…
tampered the more…
inexplicable the…
human reaction.
January 6th, 2011 at 9:49 pm
That horse is aching to be a unicorn to make this cover crazier.
January 7th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Excellent find, Don.
That horse should be aching from its adopted hyena-like pose!
January 17th, 2011 at 2:20 pm
The aliens gave somebody Grave’s disease!
January 22nd, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Maybe there’s a proper context for this cover — blurb and all — in which it seems perfectly lucid. Such as…dropping acid during a Renaissance Festival.
November 30th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Dude, that was a REALLY weird episode of “Sesame Street.”
June 9th, 2013 at 7:18 pm
Right. *deep breath*
abstraction
big-handitis
busy hands
geometric oddities
Haircut 100
longbow
perspective problems
skulls-a-poppin’
sky eyes
strange animals
…I think that about covers it then. Still I can’t figure out what that thing is at bottom center, between the hands. It looks something like a sea squirt with a pair of green rugose arms. And I can almost make out something emerging from the top up the cover toward the Killer Koosh…ah, I’m done.
August 25th, 2015 at 1:17 am
There is a carnivorous mouth with electric blue eighties hair coming to eat that boy.
That is a sentence that has never before been typed or thought in the entire history of the English language.
September 15th, 2015 at 7:53 pm
Needs a “behind you” and “intoxicated”, if there is such a tag.
Those boxes remind me a bit of the non-cleaned-up version of Star Wars..
September 15th, 2015 at 8:22 pm
Clearly the aliens tampered with that horse. It’s half-giraffe. And it is indeed inexplicable that, in reaction, humans bought the book.
September 15th, 2015 at 8:46 pm
That horse is a wolf wearing a hat with built-in mask covering the muzzle inside the ‘neck’.
September 15th, 2015 at 11:01 pm
@Anna T.: perhaps you weren’t yet alive when Biscuit Boy made the fatal mistake of hosting Sesame Street…
November 8th, 2016 at 1:03 pm
Marty Feldman would never stoop to being drawn on a book cover!
December 6th, 2019 at 7:43 am
Yep. The title describes what everyone looking at the cover will do.
Providing they can actually see the whole thing and aren’t rendered blind at the start by the title font.
Original submitter Don didn’t mention the arms that extend under the bug-eyed person’s chin.
December 6th, 2019 at 12:07 pm
Original art internet auctioned on April 14. Not going to join the site to get the results, but it appears there were 14 bids.
https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/covers/kelly-freas-recoil-paperback-novel-cover-painting-original-art-ace-double-books-1971-/a/121915-13051.s
December 6th, 2019 at 12:28 pm
This is what happens if you sneeze with your eyes open.
December 6th, 2019 at 12:59 pm
The only human reactions on display here are sullen resentment and WTF, neither of which are inexplicable under the circumstances.
December 6th, 2019 at 2:19 pm
Just to the right of the horse’s hooves — I can’t decide if that’s the face of a bearded man, or just a bush.
December 6th, 2019 at 8:34 pm
@Tor M—It’s probably both. Your post made me check out that horse more closely, and I notice his left rear leg seems to both in front of and behind his right front leg at the same time. If you look at it just right, it appears his hind parts are facing away from the rest of him. This is definitely a Flashback Friday-worthy cover!
December 6th, 2019 at 9:29 pm
@B. Chiclitz: do we have an Escher Horse tag?
The mouth-thing looks to me like a Langolier in severe need of a haircut.
Kelly Freas either phoned this one in or threw up his hands in despair after being given overly specific instructions.
December 6th, 2019 at 11:14 pm
My theory is the woman in the middle was the last part to be painted, Kelly Freas faithfully reproducing his model’s expression as she looked at the rest of the picture.
December 7th, 2019 at 4:40 am
@B. Chiclitz: You are right about the horse. If Freas had done that on purpose, it would have been clever. But I think it’s just as much of an accident as the bush looking like a face.
December 7th, 2019 at 7:02 am
@Tor M—Freas was a great artist, IMHO. His work for MAD magazine is permanently etched into my childhood memory circuits, like the legendary Son of Mad. With this one, as all artists must do from time to time, he seems to be making a quick buck
December 7th, 2019 at 8:13 am
Thinking of Kelly’s work for MAD, I suppose the expression here is “Yes, me worry! And can you blame me?”
Kelly certainly had a sense of humor and perhaps we’re missing something here. Maybe the book’s contents really are that daft and he illustrated it too faithfully.
@Bruce: Long-haired Langolier, or blue-dyed Fizzgig?