Joe Kenney, the excellent blogger of Glorious Trash, kicks off his tenure as an apparently regular columnist with an article on Andrew Sugar's Enforcer men's adventure series. I actually have the second installment, Calling Doctor Kill!, and was looking forward to it (you know how I love hospital settings, especially the nurses!!!), so I'm sorry to read him give it a thumbs-down, but his writing about it and all the others is still a pleasure.
Kenney's piece is actually the odd-man out, here. The rest of the issue is a well-structured drill-down from big-picture to fine-grain. Marriott begins with a feature about parent/umbrella company Universal Publishing (no relation to the film studio), then one about Universal's sleaze imprint Beacon, then reprints Brian Ritt's outstanding piece for James Reasoner's Rough Edges blog about Beacon mainstay Orrie Hitt (about whom this blog is a treasure-trove). Next we get a gallery juxtaposing original art from Brian Emrich's collection with the Beacon paperback covers for which the art was used--see, for example, the image at the top of this post. Features about other Universal lines, from Tandem's science-fantasy titles to Softcover Library's cheeezy photo-covers and back to Tandem's spaghetti-western adaptations round out the issue, all illustrated in full-color with nearly comprehensive cover-art galleries.
If you love vintage paperbacks, get this issue before it sells out, and get a subscription so you don't miss any other issues!
7 comments:
I never heard of this mag --I'm so excited! Thanks for the heads up.
Always happy to help, Kelly! I'm just sorry so many of the prior issues are sold out. Maybe we can twist Justin's arm into doing some reprints . . . ?
I bought one of the first issues because it had one of the few discussions of the Gor series. Although the early ones tended to focus on British paperbacks, the new issues are including more and more from this side of the pond. And I agree, they keep getting better and better all the time.
Did you mean the Award sf/fantasy titles, btw? That was the UPD product I was first aware of, before catching up with GALAXY magazine, which they ran into the ground by 1980.
Nice to see Geis (rhymer) so prominently displayed...he's a long-time sf fan and occasional sf writer, who has published some sort of interesting fanzine or another for most of the last fifty years.
An incredible mag, and I agree that the latest issue is simply sublime.
Orrie Hitt gets a dozen bloody pages!
Thanks for the mention regarding the Orrie Hitt article! Actually, my last name is "R"itt with "R". It would be cool to be related to Orrie, but the name similarity is just an odd coincidence.
Brian Ritt
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