Recently I contributed to a discussion on the Restricted Data blog, and decided I should expand upon it here.

Wikipedia tells us, "Swipe is a comics term that refers to the intentional copying of a cover, panel, or page from an earlier comic book or graphic novel without crediting the original artist ( Read more... )

I was reading peteralway often writes about models he's building. On a recent evening, his subject was the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine. He mentioned misgivings about the accuracy of the model's hull cross-section.

This made me wonder about finding reference photos online-- and, naturally, it led me to wonder whether Life had taken ( Read more... )

I am fascinated by the works of Boris Artzybasheff, despite his penchant for creepiness.

I've previously written about his illustrations of inhabitants of the Moon in 1958 and Buckminster Fuller's head in 1964.

For a Life spread about Mars in the September 24, 1956 issue, Artzybasheff showed us Martians portrayed in literature through the ( Read more... )

I'll be giving two slide talks and two panels at Capricon this coming weekend. Thirty Capricons, and I've attended every one.  Wow.

Capricon (near Chicago) is supposed to have a teleconference hookup with Boskone in Boston.  It will be interesting to learn whether this works well.  I think it would be cool to be on a transcontinental panel someday ( Read more... )

Yes indeed, Fritz Goro did take more pictures of Lichtenberg figures in Dr. Arno Brasch's laboratory on his visit during chilly February of 1947; as I mentioned in an earlier posting, they are tagged "Capacitron". This was the name of Brasch's device for generating an electron beam. He was using it to irradiate foods in the hope of killing ( Read more... )

The other day I noticed that the Life magazine photo collection at Google now allows users to provide tags or "labels" for the images.

This might help alleviate the helpless feeling I get when I realize that I'm looking at a photo, and I know what's in it, but there is no indication that Life does. For example, Allan Grant's pictures of the ( Read more... )

It's 1958. Satellites are in the sky. The Moon seems within our grasp.

Life runs a spread about the Moon in its 15 December issue. Lunar science, photos of the Army's new Moon rocket, an essay about how the Earth is affected by the Moon...

They commission the great Boris Artzybasheff, famous for his grotesque covers for Time, to paint an ( Read more... )

Remember the mysterious ballet performed on the set of Destination Moon? Here are eightysome of Allan Grant's 1949 photos, assembled from thumbnails into a crude animation.
( Read more... )

I was thinking about 3-D movies today. Suddenly I recalled that I had seen a batch of photos in the Google Life archive that included one of the most famous of all Life's pictures: patrons in a movie theatre wearing 3-D glasses.

It was shot by the appropriately-named J. R. Eyerman (1906-1985), at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood on 26 November ( Read more... )

Winthrop Sargeant writes about the world of science fiction in Life, 21 May 1951.

(Apparently Life is now available at Google Books.)