Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
Epic head trip by Todd, who painted several other scenes involving mariners and mythical beasts, according to Last Gasp’s Ron Turner. The ad is probably from a Krupp Mail Order Catalog.
The giant poster (20″ x 26″) was on sale fairly recently at Last Gasp Publishing, although it’s out of stock now.
(Images by appleclub and jl.incrowd)
Promotional poster showing all of the posters in the series. The Third Eye also put out a series of postcards and jigsaw puzzles with the same designs. Overall, the combination of Marvel’s illustration superpowers with the psychedelic mindset (the third eye enables metaphysical sight, in mystical traditions) was extremely successful and influential. Not all of the posters are winners (Spider-Man doesn’t really fit), and the exclusion of Steranko’s Nick Fury is unaccountable. Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four (below) is probably my favorite. You can see close-ups of most of the posters here.
You can see original Third Eye designs here.
(Images via Patrick Owsley and Cap’n’s Comics)
You can see the Pencil by Number Set on the back cover: the knight looks very similar to Dirk from Dragon’s Lair, surely not a coincidence. The artist on this set is uncredited. More interesting are the two Giant Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Pen and Poster Sets (Arrow, 1981)—an early license with great art by Larry Elmore, Jim Holloway, and Jim Roslof—that you can see at The Acaeum.
Hasbro also released a D&D Lite-Brite Picture Refill.
Photos are via eBay seller burntwire, who has been selling very rare merchandise from the TSR archives.
Weird Worlds was a kid’s horror and fantasy magazine that ran for eight issues from 1978 to 1981. Much like other Scholastic magazines, many issues featured a detachable poster. I would love to scan the whole run, because it’s a great example of the kind of advanced, somewhat esoteric material kids expected at the time. There were stories by sci-fi luminaries like Bradbury and Asimov, features on UFOs and paranormal phenomena, weird and disturbing facts and Forteana, fantasy art portfolios (Frazetta, the Brothers Hildebrandt). I particularly remember the wonderfully graphic comic book strips by Steve Bissette, best known now for illustrating Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing in the ’80s. You can read a few of these strips at The Horrors of It All.
Also check out this Monsters of the Greek Myths poster, a Scholastic giveaway from the same year. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: 1980 was a hell of a year to be a kid.
(Image via Donald Deveau/Flickr)
Yet another format made popular by Star Wars, it was well in decline by this time. Kids were too busy making stuff on computers. The last poster pen set associated with a major franchise/film may have been Jurassic Park (1992). There was also a Star Trek: The Next Generation set that came out around the same time.
One of many Star Wars poster sets, this one came with Kenner’s “Playnts” that dried out, as I recall, within a few hours. Were these posters also given away in a General Mills cereal promotion, or am I thinking of something else?
2 Warps to Neptune 